107 Mothers awarded at the Venice Festival. Cinematik will open with one of the most discussed films of these days.

The jury of the ORIZZONTI section of the 78th Venice Film Festival (Jasmila Žbanić, Mona Fastvold, Shahram Mokri, Josh Siegel, Nadia Terranova) awarded the Slovak film 107 Mothers for the best screenplay. Big congratulations to Petr Kerekes and Ivan Ostrochovský and we look forward to the Slovak premiere at Cinematik. The film 107 Mothers will open in its 16th year and the ceremony is open (until the hall is filled) for accredited participants. Cenzorka will have its ceremonial Slovak premiere at Cinematika, which will take place this year from 14 to 19 September.

Blinded by jealousy, young Lesja murders her husband. Although she was pregnant at that time, she did not avoid justice and is to serve seven years in prison in Odesa in the south of Ukraine. Here, she meets a lone operations officer, Irina, who has a particularly sensitive duty in a facility: As a professional prison censor, she must read and check all correspondence between convicts and their families, friends, but also partners. The paths of two totally different women get intertwined when Lesja, after an unsuccessful request for conditional release, fights to keep her son Kolja from ending up in an orphanage.

The theme of 107 mothers was brought by Ivan Ostrochovský, who participated in the film as a co-author of the screenplay and as a producer. Originally, they prepared a documentary about the extraordinary work and the fate of real prison censors. Over the course of the process of collecting material, Slovak filmmakers visited several Ukrainian prisons. In one of them, they met Irina Alexandrovna, a real prison censor who ended up cast in the role of herself in the film. According to Peter Kerekes, Irina was supposed to be just an episodic character, but the story of a single woman in her fifties reading the intimate correspondence of strangers all day was so fascinating for the filmmakers that they decided to focus on this very aspect. For the award-winning documentary filmmaker Kerekes, 107 mothers will be a feature film debut.