Mothering (2018)

Souvenir

The enigmatic Isabel decides to rent her belly to give birth to the baby of Sara and Joaquin, a possessive couple obsessed with the idea of starting a family.

A Mother

After getting released from prison, Eeva returns to her old home town with only a shoulder bag, cellphone and the clothes she is wearing. She wants to find her grown-up daughter, but the townspeople soon make it clear that she is not welcome.

Jasmine Women

Zhang Ziyi plays the youngest of three generations of women who leads lives in Shanghai. Joan Chen plays the great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother. The film recounts this family, the mistakes they make, and a cycle that the granddaughter breaks out of.

Fugue

Tatiana Clark, an established musician, is preparing for a concert with her daughter Anna. Their strained relationship and Tatiana's silence towards her famous mother, Dame Maria Clark, create tension. It seems that these three exceptionally talented women are caught in a haunting cycle of music and isolation. Themes of family, loneliness, commitment and the enigmatic concept of fugue underpin their story, suggesting an inescapable intertwining of their lives.

Queen of Clouds

Piotr manages to buy a splendid though dilapidated villa from the eccentric 80-year-old painter Mimi. The woman treats him like her long-lost only son whereas Piotr tries to send her away to old people's home.

Blonde Venus

In an effort to be able to afford expensive treatment for her gravely ill American husband, a retired German entertainer returns to the cabaret as Blonde Venus and catches the eye of a wealthy politician.

The Back-Up Plan

When Zoe tires of looking for Mr. Right, she decides to have a baby on her own. But on the day she's artificially inseminated, she meets Stan, who seems to be just who she's been searching for all her life. Now, Zoe has to figure out how to make her two life's dreams fit with each other.

Ang Tanging Ina

Desperate to provide a comfortable life for her children, Ina willingly takes all kinds of jobs available to her. But what happens when Ina's family continues to fall apart despite all her sacrifices?

Come to My Voice

In a snowy Kurdish mountain village, in the east of Turkey, an old woman Berfé and her granddaughter Jiyan are distressed. The only man in the household, Temo, the son of one and the father of the other, was arrested by the Turkish military. The commanding officer has been told that the villagers are hiding weapons, so he arrested all the men and announced that they will be kept in prison until their families hand over the weapons. The problem is that there are no weapons in the village. Desperate, Berfé and Jiyan embark on a long journey, in search of a gun which they could exchange for their beloved Temo. Will the old woman and her innocent granddaughter find a way out of the inextricable Kurdish identity conflict?

Bachelor Mother

Polly Parrish, a clerk at Merlin's Department Store, is mistakenly presumed to be the mother of a foundling. Outraged at Polly's unmotherly conduct, David Merlin becomes determined to keep the single woman and "her" baby together.

Imitation of Life

In 1940s New York, a white widow who dreams of being on Broadway has a chance encounter with a black single mother, who becomes her maid.

Mother

Ten years have gone by since Elena's six-year old son has disappeared. The last thing she heard of him was a phone call he gave her, saying that he was lost on a beach in France and couldn't find his father. Nowadays, Elena lives on this same beach and manages a restaurant. She is finally beginning to emerge from this tragic episode when she meets a French teenager who strongly reminds her of her lost son. The two of them will embark on a relationship which will sow chaos and distrust around them.

Close-Knit

After being neglected by her mother, a little girl is taken in by her uncle and his transgender girlfriend, who create a loving home for her.

Roles We Play

An older professor longing for motherhood must recalibrate her path to pregnancy when she realizes one of her favorite students is a potential sperm donor.

Cotton Wool

A single mother suffers a devastating stroke leaving her teenage daughter and 7-year-old son to care for her, testing the family's strength to hold things together as their roles are reversed.

Scud Patriot

Plot unavailable

Turtles Can Fly

Turtles Can Fly tells the story of a group of young children near the Turkey-Iraq border. They clean up mines and wait for the Saddam regime to fall.

The Promise

The impossibility of guide her three daughters in life and the constant failed promise to be a good mother frustrate and imprison Susana more and more. Ana and Clara, her older daughters, decide to release her from her burden.

C'mon C'mon

Johnny and his young nephew forge a tenuous but transformational relationship when they embark on a cross-country trip to see life away from Los Angeles.

Sugar Island

An unwanted pregnancy triggers the journey into adulthood for Makenya, a Dominican-Haitian teenager who lives in the Batey, a community surrounded by sugarcane fields.

Wasp

Zoë is a single mother who lives with her four children in Dartford. She is poor and can't afford to buy food. One day her old flame drives by and asks her to go on a date with him. Scared that he doesn't want to go out with her, she lies and tells him that she is just babysitting the kids. This will be her first date in years.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

With her life crashing down around her, Linda attempts to navigate her child's mysterious illness, her absent husband, a missing person, and an increasingly hostile relationship with her therapist.

Violett

In a rural Australian town, a sick Mother fears unspeakable evil will soon snatch her 11 year old daughter, Violett. As bizarre visions and disturbing characters from the neighborhood emerge, Sonya is about to discover more than just one grisly truth.

Earth Mama

A pregnant single mother, with two children in foster care, embraces her Bay Area community as she fights to reclaim her family.

Antichrist

A grieving couple retreats to their cabin 'Eden' in the woods, hoping to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse.

In the Jam Jar

n the Jam Jar is an invitation to the intimacy of 81-year-old Joan’s final days, whose musings silently echo with Dan’s, her 50-year-old son. This fiction short-movie is a dive into death and grief, a tribute to maternal love comprised of nail clippings, aquarelle, strawberry jam and a ghost radar.

True Mothers

After suffering through a long and unsuccessful series of fertility treatments, Satoko and her husband Kiyokazu make the decision to adopt a child. Six years after adopting a boy they named Asato, Satoko has quit her job to concentrate fully on her husband and son. The family lives a peaceful existence until the arrival of a stranger.

Lullaby

Amaia has just become a mother, and the challenge is even more significant than she imagined. So when her partner has to leave for several weeks because of his job, she decides to spend time with her parents in a lovely coastal village in the Basque Country and hopefully share the responsibility of looking after her baby. However, she forgot that even when one becomes a parent, one never stops being a daughter.

The Last Outpost

During WW1, the destinies of British officers Michael Andrews and John Stevenson seem intertwined on the battle front as much as on a more personal level.

Mother at War

1918. World War I rages in Europe while Erna Jensen tends to her ordinary life at home in Bramstrup, with her simple-minded son, Kalle. One day the village constable comes to enlist Kalle for military service for the German Empire – of which Southern Jutland is a part. If Erna is to save Kalle from certain death, she must follow him through thick and thin. Upon a chance meeting with a deserting solder she trades identities. Now disguised as Private Julius Rasmussen, Erna heads for the front. In her encounters with the other soldiers and in the presence of the war, unknown sides of Erna are awoken. This is the story of a woman who won’t let a war prevent her from fighting for what she loves.

People & Things

A mass grave was discovered in the small town in eastern Ukraine as consequence of the 2022 Russian invasion. Olena (34) arrives with her daughter Kira (8) and boyfriend Tymur (31) to collect the DNA test result of her missing husband Ilya. During two days, Olena will not only find out if her husband is alive, but in addition to confronting the past, she also will be faced with the most important one - the present.

Kobane

Despite being outnumbered and outgunned, a female Kurdish fighter guides her fellow fighters in the resistance to defend their city, Kobanê, from the deadly threat of ISIS. A real story of war, sacrifice, love and hope that kept the whole world on tenterhooks.

High Tide

A backup singer gets stranded in a small coastal town after losing her job in a band. She winds up in a caravan park only to encounter, by accident, the teenage daughter she deserted following her husband's death.

Ang Tanging Ina Mo: Last na 'to!

A few months after Ina left the position as the President of the Philippines, she is back in the media limelight as she releases a book of her life in her journey as a mother to her children and as a mother to the people of the Philippines. Ina now lives a simple life with her beloved children, together with her long-time best friend, Rowena.

Aurora Borealis: Northern Light

The Aurora Borealis is a story of family that is rich in twists and turns. It breaks the depths of the relationship between mother and daughter. A successful lawyer in Vienna, Olga is called back to Hungary when her old mother, Mary suddenly falls into a coma. While Mary is floating between life and death, Olga finds a deeply silent secret. The increasingly passionate research leads back to the post-war Europe of the '50s.

1988

In the winter of 1988, in the depths of the Iraq/Iran war, the border town of Halabja was attacked by chemical weapons with all its people and their different stories.

Lorraine

One of the biggest burdens a soul can carry is the loss of a loved one. How do you let go of someone you brought into the world? In this documentary, Lorraine Battle speaks on the death of her son, Calvin Antoine Battle.

Huggo

A young woman forms an unusual attachment to a stuffed toy bunny as she struggles to get her life back on track after suffering a miscarriage.

La mitad de Ana

Son confesses to his mother, Ana, that he does not feel like a girl; he is a boy. Confused and blocked, Ana will decide to stop in order to observe and understand him and, in the same way, to understand herself. Ana and Son are two sides of the same coin: a mother who does not take care of herself, of her own identity, and a boy in search of his identity with all his strength.

Monologue

Sivan Encü, a young Kurdish man, provided for his family by "smuggling" through the Turkish-Iraqi border. When he was murdered in the 2011 Robozik (Roboski) Massacre, the responsibility of family's welfare was taken over by his younger brother Sinan, who lost his life in an unfortunate accident. This is the story of their grief-stricken mother Heyam and her resilience. Alongside Heyam's struggle, the film brings the voices of Robozik elders and notables to the forefront, who have experienced first-hand the social, political and economic dimensions of smuggling, which has been the backbone of survival for the locals for many generations.

Teta

When a young boy forms an unusual connection with his late grandmother, his mother's refusal to believe spirals their lives into chaos.

Walnut Tree

Qader, a bricklayer from Sardasht in Kurdistan Iran whose wife is pregnant with her 4th child, suddenly found himself amid a war crime perpetrated by the Saddam regime. On June 28th, 1987 Iraqi air fighters dropped mustard gas bombs on the city...

Why Dig When You Can Pluck

A filmmaker seeking inspiration for her next movie brings her volatile husband and defiant young son camping on the Oregon coast. When her competing desires to be a good mother and creative artist come to a head, she reaches a painful but powerful breakthrough.

The Enchanted

Irene is a woman in her thirties with a four-year-old daughter who has just separated from her husband and cannot find her place in the world. Determined to get by at whatever cost, she flees to a remote village in the mountains to try to rebuild her life, with the help of the lush vegetation, omnipresent nature and legends around her.

Memories on Stone

Kurdish childhood friends Hussein and Alan want to produce a film about the genocide of Kurdish people in Iraq, the Anfal campaign in 1988. They learn that, to achieve veracity by the means of cinema and to face their own identity, it's worth putting everything on the line - even their own life.

Sisters Apart

Rojda, a native of Iraqi Kurdistan and a soldier in the German army, travels to a refugee camp in Greece where she manages to meet her mother, who has bad news about her sister Dilan.

Amakki

A dream-like exploration of the interconnected lives of two women and two children, celebrating the profound moments of love, loss, and resilience that shape the tapestry of womanhood. Set to the backdrop of Sidama's coffee-growing hills, 'Amakki', meaning 'your mother', captures the intricate threads that bind these women to the land, to each other, and to the unspoken essence of motherhood. The language spoken in this film is Sidaamu Afoo.

A Happy Event

She drove me into a corner, then forced me to go beyond my limits. She made me confront the absolute: love, sacrifice, tenderness, abandonment. She dislocated me, transformed me. Why didn't anyone warn me? Why doesn't anyone ever talk about this?" Un heureux événement, or an intimate view of motherhood, sincere and with no taboos.

Young Cain

Juana moves with her son Juan from the country to Caracas in search of better work and educational opportunities. When they get there they have to live in a poor home in one of the slums located in the city's outskirts, where they encounter a horrible world full of promiscuity and misery, that is quite different from what they expected and that eventually will lead Juana to self-destruction and Juan to reconsider his life in the city.

EGG

Two couples and a surrogate lay bare the complications, contradictions, heartbreak, and absurdities implicit in how we think about motherhood.

Maleta Llena

Plot unavailable

Birth/Rebirth

A single mother and a childless morgue technician are bound together by their relationship to a little girl they have reanimated from the dead.

Cabbage

On a desolate farm, a couple's prayers are answered after a visitor offers them a sinister deal. Blinded by their joy, they struggle to realize that what they once desired may lead to their own unraveling.