Judith Rohrmoser's self-portrait opens the film — and it's a provocation worth sitting with. Her baby feeds contentedly; she stares back at us through headphones, eyes carrying something that reads as grief or tectonic shift or both at once. It's the correct image to anchor a documentary that is, at its core, an argument: the Madonna-with-child tradition is a lie of omission, and five Austrian women are here to fill the gap. Director Josephine Ahnelt shoots in 16mm, which matters — the grain and warmth of the format bends the film toward memory and intimacy rather than clinical observation. She films close, cuts off heads when she wants to, zeros in on a mother trimming her baby's fingernails like that detail is the whole story. Sometimes it is. The camera operates less like a journalist's tool and more like a trusted presence that happens to be in the room. The voiceover structure is where the film does its real work. These women are not performing for the camera — they're narrating from inside the experience, which creates a layered effect: we see bodies moving through the physical reality of new parenthood while we hear minds processing what it means. The gap between image and voice is where the documentary lives. The testimonies don't flatten into a single message. One mother describes the delayed onset of the overwhelming love she'd been promised — it came gradually, not as a thunderclap on the delivery table. Another navigates the social judgment that attaches to bottle feeding after breastfeeding fails. A third confronts the fact that her relationship has changed in ways she'd been warned about and dismissed. The film respects these as distinct experiences, not data points supporting a thesis. What Ahnelt gets right, and what keeps this from tipping into advocacy filmmaking, is the tonal range. The touching moments — the bouncing, the thigh-massaging, the small daily rituals of love — sit right next to the glazed-over exhaustion she describes as 'the look of a soldier after a week in the trenches.' Both are real. Neither cancels the other. That refusal to resolve the contradiction is the film's strongest quality.
