Mother Mara

CATEGORY : Drama
COUNTRIES: Switzerland, Serbia, Luxembourg, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Slovenia
PRODUCTION :

• This and That Productions

BUDGET : 1 300 000 euro

CAST

Mirjana Karanovic, Vucic Perovic, Boris Isakovic, Jasna Zalica, Alen Liveric, Pavle Cemerikic, Jelena Curuvija

CREW

Director :

• Mirjana Karanovic

Screenplay : Mirjana Karanovic, Maja Pelevic, Ognjen Svilicic
Cinematographer : Igor Marovic
Producers : Snezana van Houwelingen

COMMENTS

FESTIVALS: Europa! Europa Film Festival (Australia) 2025, Solothurner Filmtage 2025, Haifa 2025, Eastern Neighbours FF 2024, Ljubljana IFF 2024, Festival del Cinema Europeo (Lecce) 2024, Mostra de València Cinema del Mediterrani 2024, São Paulo IFF – New Filmmakers Competition (International Premiere), Zurich Film Festival 2024, Sarajevo Film Festival 2024 (World Premiere)

DIRECTOR’S NOTE:

The film explores the character of Mara, who is built in the contradiction of being a successful woman and a “traditional” in which her patriarchal background makes her suppress her emotions and vulnerability, forcing her to sacrifice. The film aims to provoke the public and encourage other women and all other people who feel underrepresented and feel like they are serving roles in life that their inner spirit is trying to fight against.

SYNOPSIS

Mara, a successful businesswoman and single mother, is heartbroken after her son Nemanja’s untimely death. She becomes emotionally detached, refusing to communicate with friends and family. However, when she meets Milan, Nemanja’s close friend, she finds solace and comfort in their relationship. As they grow closer, they uncover more about Nemanja’s life and his passing, giving Mara an opportunity to face her life and emotions.

PRESS

Throughout her storied career as a screen and theater actress, Mirjana Karanović has never run away from a challenge. In the melodrama “Mother Mara,” her second feature as a director, co-writer and star, she gives herself challenges aplenty, including showing herself both physically and emotionally naked. – Alissa Simon, Variety

Karanovic’s filmmaking does a good job of echoing the eddies of Mara’s journey. For much of the time things are classically arranged, frames are as uncluttered and sharply composed as Mara’s glassy, minimalist home. Cinematographer Igor Marovic presents the protagonist and her setting in appropriately cool hues and the editing is slick and un-invasive. There are a few moments when things begin to unwind slightly – a recurring dream sequence in which Mara reckons with finding Namanja’s body, a trip to the night club he visited before he died, including a somewhat cathartic dancefloor sequence. These scenes don’t send Mara spiralling but further reinforce the inner life straining to get out. Mother Mara is all about the character letting go of someone else but also of finding her true self along the way. – Ben Nicholson, The Film Verdict

This character represents the countless grieving mothers who lose their children and have to face the bleak prospect of a future where they carry such an impossibly heavy emotional burden, and in crafting this fragile and sincere portrait of an ordinary woman placed in an unspeakable scenario Karanovic delivers beautiful, earnest work that consistently avoids cliché and overt sentimentality, even at its most emotionally intense.- Matthew Joseph Jenner, International Cinephile Society

Karanović notes that “Mother Mara”, about a grieving woman, who rediscovers her life force through a relationship with a friend of her late son, shows a successful woman defying convention, doing something that might be considered inappropriate for her age. – Mirjana Karanovic to Alissa Simon, Variety

Grief’s Journey Told with Sparse Beauty – Shahrbanoo Golmohamadi, Gazettely

Bold and Unapologetic: “Mother Mara” is a melodramatic tour de force that will leave audiences both emotionally drained and uplifted.- Matthew Lynch, The Tech Advocate

As an actress, Karanović has a commanding screen presence, and she is quite expressive both in the muted and in the more vocal parts of her role, and the chemistry she shares with Perović is compellingly awkward, as is usually the case in slightly repressed cultures where many things are still taboo. – Marko Stojiljković, Cineuropa 

With the death of her son, that hidden content lost its armor, its cocoon, and what I see as her impact in this film is a tremendous longing for life, which, well, was triggered by death. So, for me, this is truly a clash of Thanatos and Eros, and such a story and such a character are something very exciting and very unexpected for me. – Mirjana Karanovic to Mathew Scott, The Hollywood Reporter

Perhaps unsurprisingly as an experienced actor, Karanovic avoids over-scripting in favour of delivering many of the film’s emotional manoeuvres via body language. Her directorial style is frank and she isn’t afraid to show Mara physically as well as emotionally naked…. Right up to its last shot, Karanovic’s film challenges us not just to look at Mara but to see past the carefully groomed surface to the more unruly emotional facets that lie beneath. – Amber Wilkinson, Screendaily

Both A Good Wife and Mother Mara deal with the meaning of these roles in an ironic way, and with how we play these roles, the role of a good wife or of a mother, what kind of a title it is and what happens when this title is taken away from you. Like an army officer stripped of his rank, what is she left with now? – Mirjana Karanovic to Vladan Petkovic, Screendaily