OPEN CALLS: Green Film Lab - Budapest, TFL Co-Production Fund & TFL Next - Feature Film
Projects
Mar de Leva
After a child disappears at sea, Elena will have to confront her biggest fear: becoming a mother.
Elena travels to Capurganá, a remote beach in Colombia, to sell her late father’s beach house in order to settle the debts he left behind. She travels with Oli, a man she’s been having an affair with for the past two years and who is now in the midst of leaving his wife and kids. That weekend, Elena has an encounter with a 3-year-old boy and becomes inadvertently entangled in the boy’s disappearance, as he seems to have drowned in the sea. The child’s mother insists on sharing the responsibility with Elena who was with him for part of the afternoon. Haunted by this event, filled with guilt, Elena must return to Bogotá, where we discover she has been harbouring the secret of being pregnant. Unable to confront this situation she juggles between her job, the sale and packing of her childhood home (which strains her intricate relationship with her mother), and the challenges of building a new life with Oli amid the ongoing custody battle for his children. Elena’s guilt intensifies her existing doubts about her capability to be a mother, leading her into a downward spiral that will question her relationships, her past and her own nature. It’s only when she discovers what happened to the boy that she is able to see her own mother under a new light and motherhood with compassion.
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.
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