The Good Mothers
It all started about a year ago. The Good Mothers, the Anglo-Italian series based on the eponymous book by journalist Alex Perry, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, winning the inaugural, and thanks to budget cuts one and only, prize for best new series at the festival’s TV sidebar, the Berlinale Series.
Roughly twelve months later, the show, produced by House Productions and Fremantle-owned Wildside, which is currently airing on Hulu, and on Disney+ outside the U.S., is in the running for this year’s Critics Choice Awards in the Best Foreign Language TV Series category. The Good Mothers will go up against South Korean series Bargain, The Glory, Mask Girl and Moving, the German period drama The Interpreter of Silence, and the hit French crime series Lupin.
Based on true events, The Good Mothers was adapted for television by Stephen Butchard (Baghdad Central) and directed by Julian Jarrold (The Crown) and Elisa Amoruso (Time Is Up). It tells the story of Denise Cosco (Gaia Girace from HBO’s My Brilliant Friend), her mother Lea Garofalo (Micaela Ramazzotti), Maria Concetta Cacciola (Simona Distefano) and Giuseppina Pesce (Valentina Bellè), four women born into the powerful, and deadly, Italian Calabrian crime family the ‘ndrangheta who decide to fight the mafia from within. They cooperate with the law, represented by magistrate Anna Colace (Barbara Chichiarell), whose idea was to attack the criminal organization by leveraging the women inside it.
The Good Mothers is no ordinary mafia story, which is what makes the show stand out, both narratively and culturally.
“It seems to me one of the first opuses, if not the first, where the victims are at the center of this kind of narrative that fascinates us,” says Bellè. “Here we see the other point of view, the look from within. It’s an innovative shift in perspective and tells us much more about Italy than other [mafia] series probably can. Because it is in this genre, the way violence is presented it often becomes almost heroic. The fact that this series doesn’t become an apology for evil is at the core of its sophistication. And it was a directorial choice. Julian and Elisa chose to tell the dramatic and violent events without lingering on them. The story becomes more personal. This isn’t a series that wants to shock you but one that wants to bring you inside.”
In the history of the mafia movie genre, female characters have been marginalized, a blurred figure in the background. The Good Mothers brings these characters to the forefront and but them into sharp focus.
“This has been the most important project, but also the easiest, of my career so far,” says Elisa Amoruso. “Because I knew how to film these women. I knew where to put the camera, and what directions to give the actresses. The point of view of the oppressed women, crushed by male figures in their families, by the very people who say they love them, by their fathers, husbands, brothers – this is such a clear, well-known story, a story we’ve collectively experienced.”
“From the first minute, it was clear to us that we wanted to tell the truth,” she continues. “We chose to shoot the series in Italian, in Calabria. We wanted to bring as much reality as possible. We tried to erase what we’d already seen in mafia stories. We scrubbed out the influences of Gomorrah, Suburra, The Sopranos. We have already seen the spectacular mafia. We wanted to leave the violence off-screen, to show it through the eyes of the children.”
Not all women in ‘ngrangheta are victims. The Good Mothers also shows how women have taken up management roles in the mafia. “For a long time, it was believed that there was no female component in the ‘ngrangheta, even the judiciary didn’t take serious measures. The court didn’t issue sentences against women conspirators,” says Giovanna Truda, an associate professor of general sociology who specializes in the sociology of law at the University of Salerno.”Today, the daughters of bosses attend university, they become managers, they enter the halls of power, the ones where decisions are made. If their fathers or brothers are arrested, they can take over overnight, because they already know what to do.”
But the women at the core of the first, 6-episode season of The Good Mothers are not looking to take over. Instead, out of a love for their children, they have decided to smash the gears of the mafia machine, to end the cycle of crime and violence that has been repeating unchanged for generations.
“For the men of the ‘ndrangheta, the ‘good mothers’ are the ones who obey, who stay in the shadows, keep quiet and stay loyal, while this series shows those women who rebelled, often in the name of their children,” says Amoruso. “The women in this series had to fight for their survival, fight to find a way out of the only form of existence they have been taught. This injustice, this humiliation is something universal. It’s something the female gender knows well: The feeling of being overwhelmed, of not having a choice, of watching those who steal your chance to choose.”
The 2024 Critics Choice Awards will be held on Sunday, Jan. 14 at the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica.