“Motherland”

An honest and intimate look at the complexities of grief and healing, “Motherland” is about resilience, triumph of the human spirit and the power of unconditional love. It also reminds us of the vastly different ways in which disparate cultures confront deeply felt personal challenges.

Each year over eight million families around the world suffer the loss of a child. In Steinman’s moving and inspiring first feature, a 17-day trip to South Africa transforms the lives of six grieving women from across the US. Unexpectedly and eight thousand miles from home, each finds comfort and healing in a landscape that appears, at first, to offer little more than melancholy.

Prior to their journey, the six intrepid women of “Motherland” have each suffered the death of a child but otherwise have little in common. And although the anticipation of a long, emotional journey with a group of strangers evokes anxiety, the women all share a desire to make sense of their tragedies and to move forward with their lives. They travel half way around the world where they live with local families and work with African organizations dedicated to improving the lives of children. As they come to know each other, they assist teachers in over-crowded day care centers, lead activities with abused and at-risk teens and help care for physically-challenged youth. The work is meaningful and rewarding and a welcome reprieve from the depression, isolation and stagnation of life at home. In the end, the women share not just their stories and their pain but themselves – with and for each other and even more profoundly, with the children who touch their hearts at every turn.

“Motherland” was the winner of this year’s Emerging Visions Audience Award at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival. Its other awards include the Jury Prize for Best Feature at the 2009 Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival and Best Documentary at the 2009 California Independent Film Festival.

As a mother, I certainly responded to the terrific grief and pain these women endure on a daily basis. Following the tragic loss of their children, these women found some solace with others who have experienced similar tragedy. This community benefit, more than the actual loss and finding relief in South Africa, seems to me to be at the heart of this movie. You can see in their faces and manner that just having the opportunity to talk with others like them brings these women relief and hope that they will in fact survive the loss of their child.

This movie is very watchable, though I had to talk myself into it as I knew I would be moved to tears by these stories, and I was. It’s very interesting to listen to these women share their loss stories as well as their impressions of their work in South Africa. What I was hoping for, and what the movie does not deliver, is any kind of follow-up or epigraph about what happened to the women and their new relationships with each other after the trip. Obviously, this film is about the mothers, but there was no mention of the fathers at all – and again, not the point of the movie, but an interesting omission.

Perhaps that the movie doesn’t have a “happy ending” with everything all wrapped up neat and tidy and each of these women on the road to recovery is a realistic way to end the film. I’ve been thinking about these women and their lives since I watched the film, and that to me is an indication of a good movie – it left me wanting more, and it’s stayed with me.

If you have the chance, this is an interesting movie to see and think about.

This review was written by one of our Mile High Mama Product Reviewers, Samara R.

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