By the Winner of Golden Lion for: Before the Rain and Academy Award Nominee
Toronto Special Presentation Macedonian Academy Awards entries 2011 Critics Award & Special Jury Prize Belgrade Int. Film Festival Selected at "Panorama"Berlinale & Vilnius IFF, Cinema Mundi, Mostra Sao Paolo, Cleveland, Istanbul IFF, Cluj TIFF... Selected among 20 films for European Film Awards
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"Performances are excellent throughout the film... moments that will stay with you long after viewing the fim... contemporary cinema that should be viewed by audiences around the world." Andrew Horton Cineaste
"I was never less than engaged." Anne Thomson, Indiewire "Conceptually challenging and thoroughly satisfying" Chris Bilton, Eye Weekly
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Synopsis
Two nine-year-old girls report a flasher
to the police even though they never saw him. Three filmmakers meet the
only residents of a deserted village - an elderly brother and sister who
have not spoken to each other in 16 years. Retired cleaning women are found raped and strangled in
a small town.
Cast: Ana Stojanovska, Vladimir Jacev, Dimitar Gjorgjievski, Ratka Radmanovic, Salaetin Bilal
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The trilogy of episodes he has assembled in this always thoughtful, often provocative, and finally unsettling film allows Manchevski the freedom to wander through very different facets of contemporary Macedonia. The first episode – centred around a wilful and wonderfully independent child who, outraged that a schoolmate has been “flashed,” goes off to the police station to report the “crime” – contains a deeper sense of moral conflict. The second episode, which follows a filmmaking crew in search of old rural traditions, concerns two very old, flinty peasants. The only inhabitants of a village that was almost entirely abandoned, their ghostly lives act as a living thread to the past. And the third episode, by far the most disturbing, moves into pure documentary as it chronicles the shocking deaths of a number of women, all middle-aged mothers, killed at the hands of a psychopath who seems to suffer from a mother-complex.
Mothers begins with fiction, indeed with the fabrication of a lie, moves on to an attempt at the fabrication of a myth and ends in the shattering imagery of the real, where no fabrication is possible. Lying below the surface of all the episodes is a small web of fibs and betrayals, minor on the whole, but gaining an awful power in the final act, where a man respected by the community turns out to have deceived them all. There is no easy reading of Mothers, only a need for us to work with the filmmaker to uncover its many meanings.
Piers Handling Director of TIFF/Toronto Intl. film Festival
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| Countries: Macedonia-Bulgaria-France Language: Macedonian Production company: Banana Films Co-Production company: Cine Sud Promotion Length: 124min./35mm/Color Available Worldwide
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