(M)OTHER

Motherhood is the most natural thing in the world. Or so it’s said. Yet the demands on women with children have rarely been as challenging and contradictory as they are in the Western world today. Hopes of happiness are often followed by discrimination, excessive demands and feelings of guilt. The role of mother has become a glorified ideal, but one that is still often legitimised as “woman’s true nature”. We live at a time where three people could claim to be the same child’s mother: the donor who donates her eggs to enable another woman to conceive, the surrogate mother who bears a child on behalf of someone else and the woman who ultimately raises the child. But men, too, frequently bring up children – without the support of a woman – for example,in homosexual relationships or if children stay with the father after a divorce. What makes a human being a real mother? Director Antonia Hungerland embarks on a personal quest to find out what motherhood means to her personally. She encounters all kinds of people, none of whom seem to correspond to our traditional notion of a ‘real mother’. What is their vision of motherhood? A personal and poetic documentary that raises socially pertinent and forward-looking questions.