After my father passed, I found some videos of my
childhood: birthdays, baths, costume parties. As I scrolled
between them, I started seeing (mostly hearing) what really
happened between my parents, what my mother was going
through while becoming a mother. I realised I had never
thought about her as a woman, but only as my mother,
who I expected to be an entity full of attributes and love,
who I judged over the years every time she fell out of that
description. I never thought that this history would be so
important to me until I confronted the decision of becoming
a mother myself and saw how my staggering doubt of seeing
myself as one was intrinsically connected to those years.
Mar de Leva is ignited with a tragedy, an accident, maybe a
mistake of a mother that is responsible for the death of her
child. But the film will not stay merely in the investigation
of what happened to the boy, it will be a film that explores
the complexities of what it means to be a mother; a
psychological, emotional journey of a woman about to
become a mother despite her own fears. This film is about
motherhood, but it won’t romanticise it, but instead, show it
in its most human state: its imperfection.