Mutter und Sohn

Mother and Son

Mother and Son is a love story about the deep affection which exists between a mother and her son. She is seriously ill, her body is feeble, her energy drained. The son nurses her lovingly. He feeds her, sits her out on a bench in front of the house, and reads postcards aloud to her.

They remember the time when he was a child and she could not let him out of her sight, being scared that she might lose him. The mother tries to hide from her son her approaching death. She asks to go for a stroll, wanting to be among people - even though she can′t walk. Her son carries her through the empty village; a deserted place in which they are the last inhabitants. The landscape in which the mother and son live has a sad beauty to it, its images having more similarity with the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich than those of the glossy superficialities of many films. Only twice does the exterior world appear on the horizon, like a clue that other people do exist and in the form of a locomotive′s smoke trail - which only the son sees, gazing at it longingly. When his mother dies, the son is left entirely alone, remaining in a world which can offer him no comfort.

Source: German films Service & Marketing GmbH