Under the shade of a Magnolia tree, a group of pregnant women gathers weekly. Among them is Teresa, an experienced midwife who listens to them attentively. Sitting in a circle, the women reflect on the impending birth of their children and their own emerging roles as mothers.

Being mother is the most natural thing in the world. Or so it seems. Yet the demands on women with children have rarely been as overloaded and contradictory as they are in today’s Western world. Promises of happiness are often followed by disadvantages, excessive demands and feelings of guilt. The mother has become an artificially glorified ideal, which nevertheless is often legitimized by the „nature of the woman“. We live in a time when three people could claim to be the same child’s mother: egg donors give their genes to beget children, surrogate mothers deliver babies which they give away immediately after birth, and men raise children by themselves – without a woman at their side. Hence the question arises: What makes a human being a real mother?

The planet’s busiest maternity hospital is located in one of its poorest and most populous countries: the Philippines. There, poor women face devastating consequences as their country struggles with reproductive health policy and the politics of conservative Catholic ideologies.

"On the Tip of the Heart" - is a documentary on the St Peter's Hospital in Brussels, structured around seven doors from the maternity to the morgue. This is an opportunity for the director to ask the audience a question, namely: what is there in common between a medieval city, human life and a hospital?

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As a letter to her son, the filmmaker testifies her experience as a photographer aboard the Aquarius, a ship that rescued 29,523 people in the Mediterranean between 2016 and 2018.

This student film by the award-winning Helena Třeštíková bears many of the hallmarks of her later work. Made as a graduation piece when she was at the FAMU Film and TV Academy in Prague, we see the director developing the distinctive observational style of filmmaking that she has used so effectively throughout her career. Over the course of several months, she follows a young pregnant woman as she becomes slowly acquainted with the joys and responsibilities of motherhood.

Given the fetishizing and normalizing character that is given to motherhood in patriarchy in order to perpetuate the social order, do we truly choose to be mothers? Why is care, of fundamental vital labor, presupposed as an especially appropriate task for women?

Two drag queens living in a place where homophobia and transphobia are common open their hearts to the world, revealing the human being behind the makeup and wigs. They share the reality of drag as an art form and what it means to move forward as part of the LGBTTTI+ community in a Latin American context.

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Charlotte, a sleep-deprived new mother grappling with postpartum depression, begins to hear unsettling interference noises emanating from her baby monitor.

Maria is a shellfisherwoman and midwife in a small village in the Illa de Arousa in 1970s Galicia. After an unexpected event, she is forced to flee to Portugal.

Claire is a midwife and has devoted her life to others. At a moment when she is preoccupied by the imminent closure of the maternity clinic where she works, her life is further turned upside down when Béatrice, her father's former mistress, turns up on the scene. Béatrice is a capricious and selfish woman, Claire's exact opposite.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, four anxious strangers take a record-breaking dose of LSD, catapulting them into a shared psychedelic dream where they must find solace and redemption before they can return to the real world.

Alba, a young woman, lives with her boyfriend in a small apartment. One morning she receives terrible news along with the few month-old baby Mía, who is dropped off in her life. Upon her arrival, Alba experiences a series of insecurities and fears that will cause her into a mental breakdown. After her father is dead, Alba is forced to take care of the baby he left, even though the baby represents imbalance in her life.

When her first daughter is born, Inés, an independent and successful woman, discovers that her previous life is slipping away from her without it being clear if what awaits her in the future is better. Dante and Soledad, a couple of saltwater fish, will be both mirrors and witnesses of her transformation. It is through her reflection that Inés will realize what she must do to face her new life.

Returning to her home town, overwhelmed by the birth of her firstborn, nineteen-year-old Chloe van Heerden tries to come to terms with motherhood. Despite the support from her own mother, Chloe struggles with the demands of caring for a newborn child. The incessant crying of her baby, the growing sense of guilt and paranoia send her into a dark depression. With a heightened urge to protect her son, she sees danger everywhere.

Emmett enters into a nightmarish game of therapy with his wife Anya, who has inexplicably taken on the persona of his estranged and recently-deceased mother.