Sightlines · a viewing thread

What the Mothers Left

A run of daughters and young women — grieving lost mothers, wary of surrogate ones, unearthing the family's secrets — where a house or a legacy keeps shaping who a girl becomes.

Festival darlings, mostly Cannes and Berlin 2025 titles — artful and patient; a couple (Sound of Falling, The Ice Tower) ask for real attention, while others (My Mom Jayne, Left-Handed Girl) go down easy.

• Sound of Falling (2025)
• Left-Handed Girl (2025)
• The Little Sister (2025)
• Miroirs No. 3 (2025)
• My Mom Jayne (2025)
• The Ice Tower (2025)
• 20,000 Species of Bees (2023) — The one where a child comes to know herself as Lucía while moving among three generations of women in a Basque family — if Sound of Falling's house of women held you, this is the recent film to pull down next.
• Sundays (2025) — A motherless girl under a widowed father, pulled toward the convent — the patient, close-watched study of a family and its absences shaping who a daughter becomes that these titles share.
• The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo (2025) — The surrogate-mother side of this thread: young Lidia grows up on the Atacama fringe raised by a found family of trans women, a legacy of chosen mothers making her who she'll be.