Malqueridas

The protagonists of this film use videos and photos taken secretly with cell phones smuggled into a Chilean women’s correctional facility to document their lives and being mothers. "We were allowed to keep them until they were two", says the narrator, whose story leads us through the film and is also one amongst many. The women’s children are taken from them at the age of two and placed with relatives, or in foster homes while their mothers often serve long sentences, trapped in confined spaces and caught up in repeating patterns of poverty, drugs, violence, and suicide. A collective story of closeness and absence, of tenderness, care, and a great loss. Tana Gilbert’s haunting montage and poetic off-screen commentary takes us into the emotional world of the mothers, whose light and heavy, beautiful and painful moments become immediately palpable through the private images.