107 Mothers

The award-winning documentary filmmaker Péter Kerekes excels in his narrative debut, crafting a prison film of a special kind.

The pregnant Lesya is sentenced to seven years in prison for the murder of her husband. After giving birth, she is transferred with her baby to a women's prison in Odessa, where other children also grow up alongside their imprisoned mothers. When Lesya's son is to be sent to a home, the prison guard Irina, who lives alone, takes an increasing interest in her fate.
With precision in both content and form, ›107 Mothers‹ crafts the microcosm of a women's prison – authentic and credible, it sometimes even seems to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, between documentary and staged reality. The film’s factual narrative style eschews sentimentality, and yet the unembellished, honest portraits of these lonely women, rejected by society, are touching. The truthfulness of this representation reverberates beyond the film.

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