Madre at the 2020 Cinemania Festival in Montreal

“Madre” by Rodrigo Sorogoyen will be screened at the first online edition of the Cinemania Festival in Montreal.

Madre

• On November 5. Available for streaming during 48 hours. Buy tickets.
• On November 20. Available for streaming during 48 hours. Buy tickets.
• Directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Spain, 2019, 129 minutes, in Spanish and French with English subtitles. Canadian premiere. Watch trailer.

Mother is an expansion of Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s 2017 Oscar-nominated short, in which an anguished mother loses her six-year-old son on a beach. The feature film picks up the story ten years after the boy’s disappearance and follows the mother, Elena (Marta Nieto), who now lives in the French coastal town where her son went missing. The film probes the emotional depths of grief as Elena lives out a hollow existence haunted by the ghost of her son. Perhaps reminding the woman of her boy, an adolescent tourist, Jean (Jules Porier), catches her interest. The gangly Jean seems drawn to Elena as well. Much of what passes between the two remains unspoken, and their growing bond results in tension and unease for those around them.

In a quiet, tremulous drama short on firm answers, Sorogoyen’s directorial technique is … boldly assertive.

— Guy Lodge, Variety