The "invisible" women who have never been recorded by history star in the documentary by Kostoula Tomadaki, "The Mother of the Station", which has moved the audiences of foreign film festivals, will be screened from February 22 at the Greek Film Archive.
Post-sexual Greece, poverty, unemployment, and migration are the only way for the thousands of women, mainly from the villages of Northern Greece that were deserted within a decade. By trains, ships and a non-return ticket, young women, not knowing the language, some illiterate, arrived in the factories of Germany.
Most of them had left their family behind: The suitcase children who grew up in constant movement; some lived in the village with their grandmother, between two languages, two educational systems, and two homelands.
Reaching the third generation of immigrants, those young women with professional skills who have fully equalised the dynamics of the rest of European women and choose for themselves where and how they will live are shown.
And they pay their own tribute to the guest worker moms who fought to give them this opportunity...
Kostoula Tomadaki notes: "The camera follows at close range the 'invisible' women who carried the pains and joys, their history, illuminating the motivations of immigration, the need and the dream for a better world. The memories and testimonies are combined with the official records that have not yet seen the light of day, but mainly the personal records of the women, which in themselves constitute a historical record of inestimable wealth for the history of Greek immigration. I tried to approach the complex elements of history by shifting the point of view to the side of the pure gaze of these women. The memory worked as a catharsis, and the black and white Super 8 can also be read as a chronicle of the 60s and 70s with the background music of 'Cloudy Sunday'."
"Mother of the Station" premiered in August 2022 as a candidate for an award at the Mumbai International Film Festival in Mumbai, while it was screened with great success at the Open Horizons of the 25th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival.
To date, the documentary has taken part and won awards in film festivals in Greece and abroad, among them the cities of Mumbai, Buenos Aires, Montreal, Toronto, New York, London, Hollywood, Antalya, Houston, Chicago, Sydney, Jaipur, Dubai, Melbourne, Warsaw, Bogota, Boston, Houston, and San Francisco.
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