For Mother’s Day
Throughout the history of cinema, the mother has never been merely a secondary or supporting character. She has often been the beating heart of the narrative, the guardian of memory, a symbol of love, suffering, sacrifice, resistance, and at times even repression and power. From its earliest years until today, cinema has constantly reinvented the image of the mother: sometimes as a sacred angel, sometimes as a broken woman, sometimes as a fighter, and sometimes as a lonely soul caught between love and destruction. Perhaps no relationship in cinema has possessed the emotional power of the bond between mother and child.
In classical American cinema, the mother was often the moral pillar of the family. In films of the 1930s and 1940s, she appeared calm, patient, and self-sacrificing — a woman who represented stability during the Great Depression and World War II. In many Hollywood melodramas, the mother had to suffer so the family could survive. Films such as Stella Dallas and later Mildred Pierce portrayed mothers as figures trapped between maternal love and social pressures. In Mildred Pierce, the mother is not only devoted to her daughter but also becomes the victim of her daughter’s ambition and emotional cruelty, revealing that a mother could be a tragic and deeply complex character rather than an untouchable saint.
In later decades, American cinema took motherhood into darker and more complicated territory. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, the mother becomes a haunting and psychologically disturbing presence, controlling her son even after death. Hitchcock demonstrated that the mother in cinema could be both a source of comfort and terror. In contrast, films such as Terms of Endearment and Kramer vs. Kramer presented mothers as more realistic and vulnerable human beings, women struggling with divorce, illness, emotional crises, and changing social expectations.
Italian cinema, particularly during the Neorealist era, connected motherhood to poverty and survival. Anna Magnani, in films by Roberto Rossellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, embodied the passionate, angry, deeply religious Italian mother driven by instinctive love. In Pasolini’s Mamma Roma, a mother desperately tries to save her son from poverty and corruption, yet society leaves no room for redemption. Here, the mother becomes more than a domestic figure; she becomes a metaphor for the suffering of the lower classes and the brutality of social injustice.
In Russian and Soviet cinema, mothers were often symbols of the homeland and resistance. Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Mother, based on Maxim Gorky’s novel, portrays a frightened and obedient woman transformed into a revolutionary figure. Later, Andrei Tarkovsky connected motherhood with memory, time, and spirituality in films such as Mirror. In Tarkovsky’s cinema, the mother is almost never entirely earthly; she becomes a poetic presence floating between past and present, embodying collective human memory itself.
In Japanese cinema, motherhood is often defined by silence and endurance. Yasujirō Ozu, in masterpieces such as Tokyo Story, depicted families disintegrating under the pressures of modern life. Elderly mothers and fathers, gentle and selfless, become victims of a rapidly changing society. In this cinema, tragedy exists not in screams but in silence. Japanese mothers suffer quietly, yet that silence carries extraordinary emotional weight.
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In India, motherhood has achieved an almost mythical status. Few films have shaped the cinematic image of the mother more profoundly than Mehboob Khan’s Mother India. Nargis portrays not only the mother of a family but the symbolic mother of an entire nation — a woman torn between maternal love and moral duty, willing even to sacrifice her own son for the sake of justice. Bollywood would revisit this image repeatedly for decades, presenting mothers as symbols of morality, tradition, and national identity. Yet more recent Indian cinema has also created more modern and layered mothers — women who possess ambitions, failures, and independent identities beyond sacrifice alone.
French cinema has often approached motherhood from a more philosophical perspective. In Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, motherhood, love, memory, and war become inseparable. In films by François Truffaut and Maurice Pialat, mothers are frequently women caught between personal freedom and family responsibility. French cinema has generally been less interested in the sacred mother than in the deeply human one.
Perhaps some of the most poetic and emotionally complex portrayals of mothers can be found in Iranian cinema. In Iranian culture, the mother has always occupied a sacred emotional space, and Iranian filmmakers have reflected that status through deeply human, emotional, and often tragic portrayals. From before the 1979 Revolution to the present day, mothers in Iranian cinema have symbolized love, patience, suffering, and resilience.
Ali Hatami created one of the most unforgettable portraits of the Iranian mother in Mother (Madar). The film’s story of children returning home to gather around their dying mother becomes an elegy for old Iran and the disintegration of the traditional family. Rogheyeh Chehreh-Azad’s extraordinary performance transformed the mother into more than an elderly woman; she became the guardian of memory and tradition, the final pillar of a collapsing home.
Dariush Mehrjui’s Mum’s Guest (Mehman-e Maman) offered a very different portrait of the Iranian mother. Golab Adineh plays a poor but proud woman struggling to preserve her family’s dignity despite poverty. In this film, the mother becomes the center of human warmth — a woman who can still offer love and hope in the midst of hardship.
In رسول ملاقلیپور’s M for Mother (Mim Mesle Madar), motherhood becomes a symbol of suffering and sacrifice. Golshifteh Farahani portrays a mother raising a disabled child with immense love while standing against the cruelty of society. The film suggests that mothers in Iranian cinema are often the final refuge of humanity itself — the place where unconditional love survives.
In recent years, Saeed Roustaee has also emerged as one of the most important Iranian filmmakers portraying mothers and family structures. In Life and a Day (Abad va Yek Rooz), the family’s mother is a worn and exhausted presence, trying to hold together the final threads of a collapsing household overwhelmed by poverty and addiction. Although the central character is Somayeh, the mother’s silent suffering dominates the emotional atmosphere of the film.
In Leila’s Brothers, Roustaee offers an even more layered portrait of the Iranian mother. The mother exists between a traditional husband, frustrated sons, and an independent daughter. She is both a victim of patriarchy and part of the system that sustains it. Roustaee portrays the Iranian mother as someone often forced to choose between justice and survival in order to preserve the family. Her anxious silences and weary expressions reflect the reality of many lower- and middle-class Iranian families.
Roustaee’s 2025 film Woman and Child also returns to the world of motherhood through the character of Mahnaz and her relationship with her children. Like many mothers in contemporary Iranian cinema, Mahnaz must simultaneously play the roles of mother, protector, provider, and survivor within a tense and unstable society. In Roustaee’s films, the mother is no longer simply a symbol of kindness; she is exhausted, complex, resilient, and at times deeply wounded by the economic and social crises surrounding her.
Iranian cinema, however, has never confined itself to traditional images of motherhood. Filmmakers such as Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Tahmineh Milani, Bahram Beyzaie, and Marzieh Meshkini brought mothers into the realm of social struggle and female identity. In The Day I Became a Woman, women at different stages of life confront social restrictions and pressures, presenting motherhood as part of the broader complexity of being a woman in Iranian society.
Bahram Beyzaie’s Bashu, the Little Stranger transcended ethnic and linguistic boundaries through the character of Na’i, a northern Iranian woman who adopts a war-displaced boy from southern Iran as her own child. She is not his biological mother, yet she embodies the true meaning of motherhood — a love beyond blood, language, or geography. Even decades later, the film remains one of the most humane portrayals of motherhood in Iranian cinema.
In many Iranian films, mothers are simultaneously symbols of resistance and victims of social structures. Sometimes they must hold families together in the absence of fathers, sometimes they carry the burden of war and poverty, and sometimes they struggle against patriarchal traditions. Over the decades, Iranian cinema has transformed mothers from peripheral figures into active, emotionally rich, and deeply layered characters.
Today, cinema around the world no longer limits motherhood to the stereotype of the self-sacrificing woman. Mothers can be angry, broken, independent, immigrant, lonely, or even antiheroes. Films from South Korea, Latin America, and the Middle East increasingly place mothers in the midst of violence, migration, poverty, and war. Yet despite all cultural differences, one common thread remains: the mother in cinema continues to represent humanity’s connection to memory, home, and love.
Perhaps that is why the death of a mother remains one of cinema’s most heartbreaking moments, while her smile can still be among its most comforting images. In cinema, the mother is never merely a character; she is the keeper of human memory itself, a voice that continues to echo long after the film has ended.
