![Movie poster for [m]otherhood (2019)](https://cdn.latestnetflix.com/t/p/w500/cEQUeSAAfe4c5GnodO3n7qdbMVX.jpg)
Overview
[m]otherhood will make us stop asking women without children why they don’t want to be mothers, because it gives us all the answers. These types of inquiries can become very annoying after a while; at times, the only way to get out gracefully is by smiling and not saying a word. This documentary brings together several women who’ve decided to sound off on the subject, and whose reasons –hard-hitting and solid– knock the concept of contemporary motherhood as an “ideal” off its pedestal.
Reviews
3 min readThe Quiet Rebellion of Not Wanting
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been asked why I don’t have children. The question usually arrives with a smile, as if it’s a compliment—You’d be such a great mother!—but the subtext is always the same: What’s wrong with you? It’s the kind of inquiry that lingers, not because it’s profound, but because it’s persistent, a societal hum that assumes the default setting for a woman’s life is motherhood. Why wouldn’t you want that? The documentary [m]otherhood doesn’t just answer the question. It dismantles it.
Directors Inés Peris and Laura García Andreu don’t frame their film as a manifesto, though it could easily be one. Instead, they let the women they interview do the talking—no narration, no expert talking heads, just faces and voices filling the frame. The effect is intimate, almost like eavesdropping on a conversation you weren’t meant to hear.
These women aren’t performing for the camera; they’re speaking to each other, to themselves, to anyone who’s ever felt the weight of that question. Their reasons for not wanting children are as varied as they are: financial instability, career ambitions, the sheer exhaustion of being a woman in a world that already demands so much. But what unites them is the quiet defiance of their answers.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsThe M fell off in Valencia. Hollywood used the leftover letters.
Search Netflix for otherhood and you get Angela Bassett, Patricia Arquette, and Felicity Huffman driving to New York after their sons skip Mother's Day. That 2019 comedy is loud, English, and easy to autoplay. The other title in the catalog, [m]otherhood, is a 55-minute Spanish documentary with a bracket around the missing letter. TMDB dates it to 4 February 2019 in Spain. It is not a sequel, a typo, or a Huffman scandal holdover. latestnetflix.com's read is that it is two Valencian friends answering a dinner-table question they were tired of smiling through.
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A Canal 9 friendship and five years of no.
Inés Peris Mestre had already decided she did not want children. Around 35 the pressure arrived anyway. "Social pressure made me doubt," she later told elDiario. She found women online in the same bind, including sociologist Orna Donath, whose book on mothers who regret it would end up on camera. Laura García Andreu had worked with her at the shuttered Valencian channel Canal 9. They spent about five years on the research. SUICA films produced with À Punt. Vogue Spain counted five chapters, No Madre, Instinto, Presión, Arrepentimiento, and Conciencia, plus fourteen women after British comic Kate Fox's opening monologue. , ,
García told La Vanguardia the pitch in one line. "Motherhood as an experience is full of myths, it is idealized. We are sold a story that everything is wonderful and it is not that way for everyone." French philosopher Elisabeth Badinter, on camera, called maternal instinct "the greatest deception of humanity." Chilean writer Lina Meruane asked the question the directors kept repeating. Every woman who wants children should have them. Why should a woman who does not want them have them anyway. ,
The threats, then the sold-out midnight slot.
German writer Sarah Fischer told the camera she loved her daughter and still regretted the circumstances of being a mother. After her book, she said, "I found people who threatened to kill me if they saw me in the street." The directors insisted the film was not against children. García told La Vanguardia they wanted the negative side spoken because it had been treated as a taboo. Midwife Maribel Castelló, also on camera, later told elDiario that a woman seeking sterilization is sent to psychologists, while nobody checks whether you are actually ready to become a mother. ,
La Cabina, Valencia's mid-length festival, gave the film its first public screenings on 21 and 23 November 2018. Both nights sold out. The jury handed the directors the Barreira prize for best screenplay in the Amalgama section. In 2019 the Valencian Film Academy named it best documentary short. RTVE's Documentos TV ran it on La 2 at midnight on 5 February 2019 under the line "being a mother is only an option." That is the Spanish TV date TMDB still carries. García took the same argument to a TEDx stage in Valencia a month later. Netflix US later filed the hour next to louder motherhood titles. The bracket stayed on the M. , , , ,
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