Motherland

“Ever since I can remember, my mother seemed aloof to me, as if shrouded in a great mystery. I was born in Bern because she had emigrated to Switzerland when she was seventeen. She was just twenty years old then, but I hardly knew anything about that. [...]

I became a mother myself and my mother loves Giulia more than anything. Suddenly she remembers things she never talked about before: her childhood in San Vito and her voyage to Switzerland. My daughter and I wanted to get to the bottom of this story once and for all and capture it in a documentary. We were aware that her progressive illness might erase the last memories forever. [...]

It is the story of a girl who, like thousands of other young women, was recruited and left her home in Italy to work abroad. [...] Because family reunification was forbidden for Italian seasonal workers in Switzerland [...], the migrant women were faced with a decision: either to ‘hear’ their children grow up over the phone – or to keep them with them, which meant officially hiding them from the authorities. [...]”

Miriam Pucitta