MOTHERLANDS
Gabriel Babsi
ELF PICTURES (Hungary), DOMESTIC FILM (Romania)
Across continents and moral principles, Motherlands tackles the problem of losing identity while chasing an imagined, better life. Migrant crisis from a smuggler's point of view.
HERVÉ was forced to flee his family in the Ivory Coast when the Civil War engulfed the country in 2012. His escape leads him to Greece where he meets a Greek woman and starts another family. To feed his newborn, he falls into a world of crime, turning to people smuggling across Europe’s tumultuous landscape to Serbia and imagined freedom. In 2016, Hervé receives a call: his father has died and he is the natural heir to the tribe’s leadership. Should he - and is he allowed to - move back to his birthplace? A European traveler shadows Hervé for six years. Shot in Greece, Macedonia and the Ivory Coast.
Gabriel Babsi / IMDb
GABRIEL BABSI was born in Milan. He graduated from Literature and Philosophy. At the age of 24, he moved to Paris where he attended the EICAR film school in the first year. In 2002 he made a short fiction, LA TACHE, which was selected for Portobello and EMAF. In 2005 he made a short documentary, FRAGMENTS OF A FRIENDSHIP, which was selected to DocLisboa, Oberhausen, Altermedia film festivals. His second short fiction, ROUGETNOIR followed in 2010, and it was screened at the Long Island Film Festival. At the end of 2012, he decided to quit Paris and move to Greece.
Director’s statement
I was following HERVÉ for six years. He is still fighting the trauma of war and the loss of his African family. He navigates his way through a moral minefield, trying to deal with his ever-changing life. I, being free, without a job or a family, never chasing money or a career, have allowed myself to be absorbed by Hervé’s own reality. I want to raise difficult questions: what is morality when you have no choices? What is ethical when you have no rights? Can we be judged? And if so by whom? In this vein, I would like to guide the viewer through the plethora of human experiences, showing paradoxical faces of Hervé throughout the film. As we proceed, Hervé’s figure gets more complex, contradictions form coherency. The aim is to vanquish labels such as good and bad choices or actions by the end of the film, so we need to come to the conclusion that we are not in the position to judge.
Where are we at?
Production budget: 96.000,00 EUR
Needed for completion: 27.000,00 EUR
Territories available: World
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Production Company profile
ELF PICTURES, a Budapest based production and distribution company, was founded in 2016 by former freelance producers Ágnes Horváth-Szabó. and András Pires Muhi. ELF debuted with the Sarajevo Jury Special Prize winner documentary, NINE MONTH WAR (2018), co-produced OCCUPATION 1968 and THE BARON RETURNS the same year. ELF has numerous international projects under way. Their supporters include the Doha Film Institute, HBO Europe, Creative Europe, HAVC, ARTE, private investors and the National Film Institute of Hungary.
agnes@elfpictures.hu