PODCAST | Chiara Nicoletti interviews Florian Eichinger, director of Hands of a mother from the 2017 Lecce European Film Festival.

To listen to the interview, click on the ► icon on the right, just above the picture

Hands of a mother won two awards at the Munich Film Fest before landing at the European Film Festival in Lecce in competition. The film deals with the bitter story of a man whose family and life is shaken as he is reminded, all of a sudden, of all the violent acts he was victim of as a child by the only person who should have protected him the most, his mother. The title highlights how violence can become even more scary when it comes from the unexpected. Even visually, everything in the film is set to let the audience understand how many horrific things can hide behind normality. The idea of the film comes from a story Eichinger read in a newspaper and that he developed to shoot the film, the closing part of his trilogy on domestic abuse.

Hands of a mother: at a family reunion on a boat, engineer Markus remembers something dreadful about his childhood after an incident involving his mother and his four-year old son. As the memories, more and more invasive, eventually threaten to destroy his marriage, Markus needs to confront his family, his mother and most of all himself, to overcome the shadows of the past.

For the official page on the festival website click here.