Irish documentary maker Ken Wardrop is back with a new film that will make grown men cry in the dark.
Mom & Me travels to Oklahoma in the USA to meet a variety of men talking about and with their mothers. Those involved range from the incarcerated to the gun-crazy, a weightlifter to a lawyer.
The twist in it all is that Oklahoma is apparently considered the manliest state in America.
"We ended up going to Oklahoma for a few different reasons," Wardrop explains. "First and foremost I wanted to create a film around a radio show, and I wanted it a real small town vibe to it.
"So I went online and searched for US small town radio show, and up popped Joe Cristiano, who's the radio show host in the film.
"For me, he was really Woody Allen-esque. That's what excited me about him."
Cristiano holds the documentary together with his monologues, but what really makes Mom & Me work is the frank and quite moving way each mother and son talk about their relationship.
"I'd always intended the film to be an explanation of how mothers impact on masculinity, but as the research developed I veered more into the relationship aspect between men and their mothers," says Wardrop.
"I thought that it would be really interesting to go to a state like this and to make a film. And it's a totally different world, obviously, to where I come from and it started to excite me."
He added: "We were blessed with the people, really, and the worlds that they introduced us to."
As well as perhaps helping sons to reconnect with their mothers, Mom & Me could also leave even the manliest male reaching for a tissue. Was it Wardrop's intention to make such a moving documentary?
"My own mum is in a nursing home, and she went into a nursing home a few years back now," he says. "And I think that certainly was part of the story that I was going on.
"I made the film as a celebration of the relationship men and their mums have. And as a filmmaker you want to move an audience. You want them – well I do anyway – make them laugh and cry.
It would be wrong of me to suggest that I don't want people to be moved ..."
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Mom & Me is on release from July 15.
