107 Mothers

Lesya, imprisoned for a crime of passion, faces seven years in an Odessa women's correctional facility. With her newborn, she enters a world filled solely with women—inmates, nurses, and wardens. Uniforms blur identities in this world of wives, widows, daughters, sisters, pregnant women, and children, making it hard to tell who is who.  

'I also wanted the film to deliver an authentic collective testimony of the convicted mothers, not only through their conversations with Iryna but also through the silent scenes—the loneliness they feel when their children are taken away and they despairingly finish their birthday cake; the flashes of happiness when the women briefly forget they're in prison. Visually, these scenes are treated almost like a photograph—a memory of a moment independent of space and time. I believe that what defined the women's relationship towards me was curiosity. I did not ask them to do anything; I did not order them around. I simply observed and listened to them, and what they were willing to share with me, I translated into this film.' - Peter KEREKES