107 Mothers

Award-winning Slovak documaker Peter Kerekes (Cooking History) dips a toe in the fiction world with the rigorously researched 107 Mothers, set inside a women’s prison in Odessa, Ukraine.

Lesya has committed a crime of passion which brings her a seven-year sentence in one of Odessa’s women’s correctional facilities. She has just given birth to her first child, and now she is entering a cloistered world populated only by women: inmates, nurses and wardens, women of all ages, wives and widows, daughters, sisters, pregnant women, and women with children too. If not for the color of the uniforms, it would sometimes be hard to tell the inmates from the staff. Take, for example, the warden Irina. She is a guardian, confidant and friend, but also a public official charged with administering punishment to the women she supervises. She lives alone in a government-issued flat on the penitentiary grounds and spends her nights rooting around the fridge and reading and censoring the love letters her wards receive from their partners. It’s all part of her job. Winner, Best Film, Les Arcs European FF; Best Director, Chicago IFF.

Director Biography

Peter Kerekes was born in Kosice, Czechoslovakia and studied film directing at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. His documentaries have won numerous awards at festivals around the world. They include: 66 Seasons (2003), Cooking History (2009), Velvet Terrorists (2013), and Batastories (2019).

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