With photos and videos taken by prisoners, this raw yet poetic debut film paints a rich picture of hitherto hidden life in a Chilean women’s prison. The focus is on mothers serving long sentences. They can keep their babies with them until they are two years old. Then the women lose control over who takes care of their children and whether they will be allowed to have contact with them at all.
The experiences of more than 20 mothers have been condensed into a collective memory, recounted through the voices of two women. They talk about powerlessness and longing. The prisoners themselves also give and receive affection and motherly love. The film opens with the cold rattle of a prison door and the warm sounds of a mother singing her child to sleep. A photo of a woman tenderly kissing her baby slowly emerges from the blackness.
As well as being extremely intimate and unique, the videos taken secretly with mobile phones are fragmented and imperfect. Yet, they are indispensable building blocks in telling this story.
IDFA X De Balie
Gerlach van Beinum is one of the last old-school crop farmers in the Netherlands. Surrounded by the advancing exponents of modernity—distribution centers, highways, multinationals – he moves through the seasons at his own pace. We follow him for several years in his fields on the outskirts of Amsterdam. With the help of his best friend
Why would you travel to a war zone if you didn’t have to? Maybe because you need an adrenaline kick? Rick from the US couldn’t get into the military, so he came up with his own alternative. He set up a company, War Zone Tours, to organize trips to conflict areas. Andrew Drury from the
Young guys in Belarus look ahead to their term of military service with a sense of dread. They know what’s awaiting them in the army: they will be harassed, bullied and beaten by the older soldiers. Motherland shows how this culture of brutality is used to control an entire population, and how it robs the
