Mothers on the Edge of a Precipice: Locarno Films Explore Troubled and Troubling Women, Taboos

The Locarno Film Festival‘s 77th edition has been screening an eclectic lineup of movies, covering a broad range of topics and themes.

However, there are some recurring topics that are touched on in several films in the lineup of the Swiss festival, such as the theme of AI and digital technology.

“Another obvious theme is the conversation around the past feminist female identity and the different declinations of such identity in the present,” Locarno’s artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro recently told THR.

Several films at Locarno particularly present women relating to their kids in ways that go beyond traditional images of all-caring mothers. For example, Iraq-born Austrian auteur Kurdwin Ayub’s sophomore fiction feature Moon, which had its world premiere in competition at the fest, includes a scene in which a mother talks about her young kid with her sister in a way that is likely to make viewers sit up and feel uncomfortable.

The Locarno international competition program also features two films that put their main focus on mothers and their feelings towards their families, which are shown in a light that is much different from more traditional depictions of mothers who are full of love and never struggle.

Case in point: Spanish filmmaker Mar Coll’s new movie, psychological thriller Salve Maria (Mothers Don’t), which caused lively debate after its world premiere at Locarno with its exploration of the primal anguish and guilt of being a mother.

“Maria, a promising young writer and new mother, stumbles upon a chilling headline: a French woman has drowned her 10-month-old twins in the bathtub,” reads its description on the Locarno website, which also has a clip available here. “The gruesome act seizes Maria’s imagination, becoming an obsession. Why did she do it? From that moment onwards, the specter of infanticide looms over Maria’s life as a haunting possibility.”

In a director’s note, Coll explains about her film, which is an adaptation of Katixa Agirre’s book Mothers Don’t and stars Laura Weissmahr and Oriol Pla: “I explore the troubling figure of the regretful mother. Trapped in relentless guilt and social misunderstanding, she faces the fear of her own monstrous condition.”

During a Q&A with the filmmakers and cast members at Locarno, Coll shared with the audience how the movie came about. When she started thinking about her third film, “I was with a baby with 15 months old, and [co-writer] Valentina [Viso] already had two girls,” she recalled. “We had been talking a lot about being a mother and having long conversations and sharing our frustrations and our happiness. We knew that the mother experience was so important for our lives and that it was cinematographic. At that time, I read this book Mothers Don’t. And so we decided to to talk about this subject in this way because I feel that motherhood also is a very visceral and irrational experience.”

About her own experience with her film, Coll said, “It was painful, even for me” who was working on the film and its themes for an extended period. “But I found it even more related to me, and it was very important.”

Mothers Don’t star Weissmahr said about her first experience playing a main character in a film was challenging given the intensity of emotions and the fact that she has no kids and didn’t even know how to hold a baby. “There was this worry that I had questions about being a mother, but it turned out that playing this part was like being a fresh mother,” she explained. “I was experiencing things on the go that were new to me, so they were surprising in the moment,” similar to what happens to actual mothers.

At a press conference for Mothers Don’t, Weissmahr also shared: “Some people might see the movie, and they’ll be reminded of when they became mothers. And I’ll become a mother one day, and I’ll be reminded of the movie.”

Coll told the same press conference that she hopes to confront viewers with emotions. “I really wanted to do a film that was a sensation – very physical, very vibrating – not intellectual, to work with the genre” of horror and thriller films. “It was very important to build the atmosphere and to to reach the audience with all this anguish and all this oppression.”

The Spanish filmmaker concluded that for her it was important to express uncomfortable things, saying: “It’s a very difficult subject. It’s a taboo.”

The second international competition film at Locarno that provides an uneasy and challenging perspective on motherhood is Der Spatz im Kamin (The Sparrow in the Chimney), directed by Ramon Zürcher. The cast of the German-language feature, which had Locarno audiences buzzing, includes Maren Eggert (I’m Your Man) as Karen, Britta Hammelstein (The Baader Meinhof Complex) as Jule, and Andreas Döhler (All Quiet on the Western Front) as Markus, among others.

Written, directed, and edited by Zürcher (The Girl and the Spider, The Strange Little Cat) and produced by his brother Silvan, the film’s page on the Locarno fest website has this summary: “Karen and Markus live with their kids in Karen’s childhood home, nestled in the countryside. On Markus’ birthday, Karen’s sister Jule arrives with her family. The sisters are complete opposites. Haunted by memories of their late mother, Jule feels driven to challenge Karen’s authority. As the house fills up, Karen’s tension grows until everything explodes into a fiery inferno.”

Nazzaro shared with THR that the movie, a trailer for which you can watch here, “deals with a family that is on the verge of either exploding or imploding,” adding: “It is another film where family and society overlap and blend into each other.”

Asked by THR during the press conference for the film whether he had any thoughts on why mothers are being portrayed in ways rarely seen before in two titles in the main competition section and maybe beyond, Ramon Zürcher shared these thoughts, translated from German. “I see that too. There are many films with women who carry an abyss inside them. But my main goal wasn’t to generate an ambivalent, dark female character. I was interested in the topic of what it is like when there is an obstacle for someone to respond to their own children with care and love, and what that means.”

He added: “There are the labels bad mother, refusing motherhood, regretting motherhood, and the film can also be thought about, felt or read in that context. But in the beginning, the idea wasn’t to construct such a figure.”

One member of the cast later also told THR that she appreciated the much more complex and nuanced portrayal of women and motherhood in the film and hopes for more such female characters in the future. “There is a view, an expectation from society that has been around forever,” Hammelstein said. “It tells women, whether they are a mother or not, but being a mother is special, unfortunately – I’m a mother, so I know – that they have to be perfect. A woman, especially a mother, has to be caring.”

Even in a changing society, that aspect has not changed much, the actress argued. “She has to maybe also be a career woman, which is new, but she has to do the care work in addition to the regular work,” she said. “And in society, she is esteemed because of that more than men.”

Concluded Hammelstein: “That’s why I think it’s more important to tell these stories of women rather than men because an abstinent man or an authoritarian father is considered more normal than a mother like that. But of course, this also exists in women, and we should stop judging. We should stop judging only women for that.”