ZagrebDox Presents Touching Mothers and Daughters

In a series of interesting programme categories featured at the 13th edition of ZagrebDox, one that particularly stands out is Mothers and Daughters. It includes four titles centred around the complex and ever intriguing relationship between two generations of women in the same family.

Polish director Paweł Łoziński's new film You Have No Idea How Much I Love You was made during young woman and her mother's psychotherapy treatments. The camera is always directed at only one person, revealing every single feeling hidden behind words and silences. The compassionate therapist carefully but determinedly removes the thick layers of protection both the mother and the daughter wrapped themselves in. The screening is scheduled for 3 March and the audience will have a chance to meet the director during the ZagrebDoXXL expanded Q&A session, opposite a psychotherapist, doctor Ljiljana Bastaić.

Another filmmakers coming to the 13th ZagrebDox is Julia Staniszewska; her film Three Conversations of Life will be presented on Monday, 27 February. The protagonists, a grandmother and a mother, disagree about the moral judgment of IVF, which is crucial due to the fact that two grandchildren would not be born without IVF. One woman's convictions and the other woman's choices seem irreconcilable. Taking a more radical stand, especially in the grandmother's case, leads to an ideological conflict. Apart from the Mothers and Daughters section, the films You Have No Idea How Much I Love You and Three Conversations of Life have been included in the festival's International Competition.

There is also Sanja Šamanović's film Heritage, focusing on a relationship between a mother and a daughter who are forced to live together again after an inherited family pattern. Their daily, seemingly banal routines are accompanied by conversations, imbued not so much with sorrow as with the inherited strength that pushes each other ahead. Director Sanja Šamanović will introduce herself to the audience after the screening on Thursday, 4 March.

Another interesting title is Amazona, the Colombian documentary whose director searches for an answer to the question what makes a woman a good mother. Director Claire Weiskopf was 11 when her mother abandoned the family and ran away to the Colombian rainforest on a quest for her own identity. Thirty years later, when she herself is pregnant, she decides to face her mother, heal the childhood wounds and find her own views on motherhood.