Reed Hillman, R., 2025.

Republic [Film] KinoFilm Festival

Three women across the city choose a daily act of care to be filmed that represents their experience of motherhood. These vignettes offer a glimpse into the many repetitive and ordinary actions that comprise the labour of modern motherhood. The women I collaborated with who feature in the film loved being asked about this all consuming experience: one they felt the rest of the world considered to be unremarkable or boring. Sharing their frustrations and also the joys these daily acts of mothering bring, they thought deeply about which activity to choose to represent their experience.

Washing is perpetually put on and hung up while the baby vies for attention. We encounter the many steps that make up the trajectory towards the midday nap. A child's dinner is made, and its eating discussed over a familiar conversation about "what's for dessert?". Extending from an observational approach, the film has an experimental aesthetic and sound design which building an impression of the claustrophobia, repetition and other worldliness of motherhood. Republic goes behind-the-scenes and behind-closed-doors into the mundanity of domestic life allowing audiences a glimpse of the beautiful and challenging interrelationship between mother and child across the ages: baby, toddler and infant. The film takes account of and illuminates the nuanced negotiations comprising women's everyday care, so often overlooked both by our society and in representations of women's lives on screen.