Tua Madre
Documentary • 2025 • 1h 7m
Can one have a child without becoming a mother?
Dania—energized by the kind of self-seriousness that, at twenty-five, still knows how to take itself seriously without becoming solemn—turns her initial panic into an exercise in self-inquiry: no longer “What should I do?” but “What does that word actually mean, the one everyone can pronounce but no one can define?”
To find out, she embarks on a secular pilgrimage through women, professionals, activists, ministers, mothers by choice and mothers by renunciation. She even encounters those male gazes that oscillate—not without a hint of anthropological comedy—between MILF fetishism and the sacred terror reserved for the figure of the mother, especially their own. A detail sufficient on its own to dismantle centuries of virile rhetoric.
Dania—energized by the kind of self-seriousness that, at twenty-five, still knows how to take itself seriously without becoming solemn—turns her initial panic into an exercise in self-inquiry: no longer “What should I do?” but “What does that word actually mean, the one everyone can pronounce but no one can define?”
To find out, she embarks on a secular pilgrimage through women, professionals, activists, ministers, mothers by choice and mothers by renunciation. She even encounters those male gazes that oscillate—not without a hint of anthropological comedy—between MILF fetishism and the sacred terror reserved for the figure of the mother, especially their own. A detail sufficient on its own to dismantle centuries of virile rhetoric.
Putting the maternal myth on trial: a pop-existential odyssey shaped by doubt
There is a question that has crossed human history more than grammar and more than religion: what is a mother?Leonardo Malaguti chooses to confront it in the least rhetorical way possible: by entrusting it to the irreverent, bewildered irony of Dania, a twenty-five-year-old film student who—at least on screen—discovers she is pregnant. A fictional pregnancy, of course, yet surprisingly more truthful than many stereotyped depictions our collective imagination has been producing for generations.
The film never aims for encyclopedic completeness: instead, it shakes the myth like artificial snow, just to see what settles on the ground once the powder falls. What remains is an unexpectedly crowded landscape: the stigma toward those who do not want children; the sly rhetoric that blames declining birth rates on women’s freedom (as if emancipation triggered demographic hemorrhage); the tension between abortion rights and conscientious objection; the fragility of choices that cannot be reduced to moralistic hashtags.
There is a question that has crossed human history more than grammar and more than religion: what is a mother?Leonardo Malaguti chooses to confront it in the least rhetorical way possible: by entrusting it to the irreverent, bewildered irony of Dania, a twenty-five-year-old film student who—at least on screen—discovers she is pregnant. A fictional pregnancy, of course, yet surprisingly more truthful than many stereotyped depictions our collective imagination has been producing for generations.
The film never aims for encyclopedic completeness: instead, it shakes the myth like artificial snow, just to see what settles on the ground once the powder falls. What remains is an unexpectedly crowded landscape: the stigma toward those who do not want children; the sly rhetoric that blames declining birth rates on women’s freedom (as if emancipation triggered demographic hemorrhage); the tension between abortion rights and conscientious objection; the fragility of choices that cannot be reduced to moralistic hashtags.
Malaguti builds a hybrid object—half fiction, half documentary—that slips through the boundaries of genre just like the theme it grapples with. The fake pregnancy works as an existential MacGuffin: it sets the machine in motion, destabilizes, and allows Dania (both character and person) to become mediator, witness, catalyst. The viewer watches the way she listens: without the presumption of judgment, with the curiosity of someone discovering that people, once freed from categories, reveal themselves as irreducible.
The decision to construct a film-device—more cinematic than documentary—is not merely formal; it is methodological. The interviews are never simple talking heads; they become tableaux vivants, static theaters, micro-landscapes of trembling light where each story takes shape as its own small universe. The Rome of the shooting locations—domestic interiors, hidden courtyards, shadow-filled living rooms—becomes the symbolic countershot of a theme that lives between intimacy and politics, body and institution. The myth of the “Italian mamma,” with all its iconographic baggage, is dismantled piece by piece through an editing style that favors jumps, surprises, surreal openings: a pop-philosophical aesthetic, closer to doubt than to doctrine.
The tour in Italian cinemas starting 19 November—from the Cinema delle Province to the Farnese and Madison—is not merely a schedule of dates but the proof that the film aspires to become an encounter rather than an object: Malaguti, Dania Rendano, Wilma Labate, and screenwriter Margherita Arioli make explicit the communal nature of the project, where sharing is an integral part of the language.
After all, the drama of motherhood is not the child but the idea others project onto the mother, and “mother” is the only concept humanity has transformed into duty without ever asking whether it was also a desire.
And at the center of the work lies a powerful idea: it is not motherhood that defines a woman, but the woman who—each time differently—defines what it means to be a mother. Here, cinema is no longer a mere instrument of representation: it becomes a place of care, of restitution, an exercise in doubt that offers itself as a possibility for thought.
The result?
Tua Madre manages to treat a sacralized theme without sacrilege, a political theme without propaganda, an intimate theme without emotional pornography. And, above all, it does so with a light irony that digs not to wound but to let air in.
Tua Madre manages to treat a sacralized theme without sacrilege, a political theme without propaganda, an intimate theme without emotional pornography. And, above all, it does so with a light irony that digs not to wound but to let air in.
The mother is the first being-for-the-other. The pity is that so few ask what her being-for-herself might look like.
In its refined simplicity, the film does not answer the question “What is a mother?” Thankfully.
It does, however, suggest that any attempt at definition is already an act of power, and that perhaps the only honest response is a chorus of discordant voices held together by a young woman who tries—with grace and a touch of carefree anarchy—to understand whether freedom passes through choosing, renouncing, or suspending judgment.
In the end, if the myth of the mother must be revisited, one might as well do it with humour, critical thought, and the awareness that no image—no matter how revered—is immune to the scrutiny of real life.
It does, however, suggest that any attempt at definition is already an act of power, and that perhaps the only honest response is a chorus of discordant voices held together by a young woman who tries—with grace and a touch of carefree anarchy—to understand whether freedom passes through choosing, renouncing, or suspending judgment.
In the end, if the myth of the mother must be revisited, one might as well do it with humour, critical thought, and the awareness that no image—no matter how revered—is immune to the scrutiny of real life.