The plot is divided into three parts. In part one, two nine-year-old girls addicted to mobile phones go to the police claiming they have seen an exhibitionist. Part two focuses on young documentary filmmakers making a film about the last two survivors in a remote village – a brother and sister who have not spoken to each other in 16 years. Part three tells the story of the evil next door: several elderly cleaners – all mothers – have been raped and murdered. A reporter writes about the crimes and is then arrested. What links the three stories?

Mothers is a triptych. The three parts function as one, working off of each other. This is a spartan, austere film. The connections are made in the mind of the beholder, and they are not necessarily narrative.
These stories are about the nature of truth. We learn something, and later learn that what we know may not be the real truth. One of the stories is a documentary, yet we don`t know more about what happened. The drama and the documentary face each other. The more we learn about the truth, the less important it is what the facts are, and the more important it becomes what the emotional truth of this living person is.
There is a line in a book by the writer Mesa Selimovic: In the end every man ends up losing. I would like for this line not to be true. I made Mothers as an attempt to figure out how to live and not be on the losing side – at least for a moment.
Perhaps we need to embrace our sadness and our fears.. -Milcho Manchevski
(source European Film Promotion)