Falling

Synopsis

Els is in her late-forties, divorced and in love again. For her, falling in love was not easy: it meant that she had to accept, she has a life even if her twenty-year-old daughter wants to die and has already asked for psychiatric euthanasia which her mother can do nothing about. In the storm of her own emotions, mixed with guilt, anger, fear and hope, love is what teaches Els to try stepping forward even if it seems impossible. She meets with her daughter one per week, continuously trying to make a distance between herself and her daughter on the purpose of continuing her own life as an independent human being and a woman in love. While she is waiting for the decision about the euthanasia from her daughter's psychiatric team and tries to accept her will, she still hopes that her daughter will change her mind. Falling is a lyrical, found footage-based testimony from a mother who faces not only the taboos surrounding motherhood, but also the most difficult situation in her life.

The film was nominated for the Ji.hlava IDFF 2023 and the Sarajevo Film Festival 2023, where it won the Heart of Sarajevo Award for Best Student Film.

#documentary

Anna Gyimesi was born in 1985 in Budapest. After receiving her degree in medicine in 2011, she turned to filmmaking. She graduated from the film directing program of the University of Theater and Film Arts, Budapest in 2019 and from documentary film directing in the Docnomads Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Course in 2021. Her interests are taboo social dilemmas represented through personal dramas, especially connected to motherhood, womanhood, and social marginalization. Her latest short Affricate, which premiered in the short film competition of Sarajevo Film Festival and screened among many others at PÖFF Shorts 2022, Seattle International Film Festival and OFF-Odense International Film Festival, focuses on a single mother raising her disabled teenage daughter facing her own deeply buried needs. Recently she is focusing on the development of her debut, Soft Hours, under the frames of Midpoint Feature Launch 2023. Falling is her graduation film at DocNomads Joint Master Programme.