1. Kanarinka, a worn-out woman in her forties, addresses a camera. She sits in an armchair, in front of a wall unit, smoking. Ornaments fill a glass case behind her.
2. She says that on November 16, 2004, at 11:45am, her mother left the house and never came back.
3. Kanarinka lives in Kičevo, a small town in Macedonia. It used to be an industrial town, but the factories have closed down, and many people are unemployed. Kanarinka's mother, Mitra Siljanoska, was one of the workers laid off. At the age of 60, she had a miserable pension and sometimes cleaned houses to make extra money.
4. INSERT - Photos of Mitra Siljanoska: a thin, poor older woman smiling with her grandchildren.
5. INSERT - Pictures of an engagement party, a family feast, and Siljanoska's photo ID.
6. It was cold the day Mitra disappeared, and she spent time selling potatoes and beans on the street, in front of her neighbor Vlado Taneski's house.
7. STILL LIFE - Vegetables lie on top of a cardboard box next to a scale in an improvised produce stand on a Kičevo sidewalk. No one mans the stand today.
8. Kanarinka describes how she and her family were confused when her mother disappeared. Mitra stepped out to go to the store and never returned. She rarely left the house for longer than an hour. Kanarinka wonders how something like this could have happened in such an intimate town.
9. An hour and-a-half after Mitra left the house, her family began looking for her, but they couldn't find her anywhere.
10. Kanarinka and her family reported Mitra missing to the police, but the police told them to look for her themselves. Kanarinka is still angry with the police, but she's a soft, kindhearted woman who accepts life as it comes to her.
11. Kanarinka then went to her neighbor Vlado, a Utrinski Vesnik journalist, to help her write a missing person's announcement in the newspaper.
12. INSERT - A clipping of the missing person announcement signed by Vlado.
13. INSERT - A photo of Vlado with his colleagues. He's a good-looking man in his fifties.
14. INSERT - Footage of people wandering the streets of grey Kičevo.
15. INSERT - Footage of trucks in a factory yard.
16. Kanarinka lights the stove in her house. It's snowing outside.
17. STILL LIFE - Bottles of nail polish sit on a little table covered in needlepoint and political party symbols.
18. Kanarinka continues her story. She's upset but masks it with shyness and reticence. On January 12, 2005, the police asked her to come to the station before taking her to the morgue.
19. A man stands under the metal construction of an unfinished sports arena. The vast empty space underneath the metal skeleton makes the structure look absurd.
20. In a rickety suburb behind the unfinished arena, horses graze in a field. A factory sits in the distance.
21. The man standing in front of the arena is Abdulkadar Osmanoski-Duljo, a chunky man in his fifties. He describes how he found Mitra's body in January 2005. He was gathering stones when his shovel hit something soft. He found the body in a ditch besides a metal pillar. The old woman's head and arms were tied, and she was covered with a rug, naked from the waist down, and stuffed into a black garbage bag. Duljo immediately called the police.
22. Duljo was so upset by his discovery that he woke up that night in a cold sweat. He says the stress caused him to lose all of his hair but that it later grew back.
23. INSERT - Police crime scene photos.
24. A few police officers open the black garbage bag holding her body. Duljo looks on.
25. INSERT - Autopsy photos suggesting Mitra was raped and strangled.
26. Kanarinka says that seeing her mother's tortured body in the morgue caused her to faint. She says she remembers being sad but also relieved: the police had finally found her mother, and the family could lay Mitra to rest.
27. INSERT - Footage from Day of the Dead in Kičevo. It's cold, and people at the cemetery hand out food and light candles in memory of the dead.
28. Behind the cemetery, a man rides a bicycle.
29. People stream into the cemetery. Relatives, young and old; children -- the cemetery is filled with people. A woman wails loudly. A hungry child eats near Mitra's grave.
30. Kanarinka remembers her mother was found naked from the waist down except for a pair of Puma sneakers. The autopsy results suggested she had been held captive before being killed.
31. Kanarinka feeds her cat in the garden. It's cold, and she watches as a neighborhood tomcat mounts her cat.
32. She says her mother's ribs and neck were broken, that she was raped, that her mother's stomach was full of sperm. Mitra was also tortured, and Kanarinka wonders how someone could do something like this to another human being.
33. INSERT - Autopsy photo close up of the Mitra's hands. Her misshapen skin wrinkles under binding rope.
34. Kanarinka cleans her mother's grave, kisses the picture on the tombstone, sits, and lights a cigarette.
35. Duljo says he thinks Allah wanted him to find Mitra because she fed him when he was a child. At least he found her, Duljo says. At least dogs didn't tear her apart.
36. Duljo remembers Kanarinka came to thank him for finding her mother. She brought him a towel and a box of chocolates.
37. Kanarinka also remembers this encounter.
38. She says she dream of her mother. In the dream, Mitra is fat and tells Kanarinka she's fine where she is now. Kanarinka still thinks she would have been better off with her daughter and grandchildren and begins crying for the first time.
39. Kanarinka remembers the times her mother took her to school and taught her to embroider.
40. Kanarinka learned the police caught her mother's killers from television. Neither the police nor the court mentioned anything about the arrest to her personally.
41. INSERT - TV footage of police arresting the four men accused of Mitra's murder and their subsequent court case. The four also killed an old man from Malkoec.
42. INSERT - Newspaper clippings about the arrest.
43. The judge, Bozin Avramoski, remembers the case. He says it's one of the most disturbing cases he's ever handled. He remembers people crying in the courtroom.
44. INSERT - Police crime scene photos showing the old man from Malkoec's body.
45. During the investigation, two of the four accused, Ante Risteski and Igor Mircevski, admitted to killing Mitra and the old man. But later, during the trial, they recanted, claiming they'd only killed the old man. For the murder of the old man, the four killers are sentenced to life in prison. For Mitra, they are sentenced to 15 years.
46. During the trial, Kanarinka says she wanted to snatch a gun from a police officer and kill the people who raped and killed her mother.
47. The judge remembers the journalists who followed the case, including Vlado Taneski.
48. INSERT - A newspaper clipping of Taneski's report.
49. INSERT - TV footage from the trial of the four accused.
50. INSERT - Newspaper clippings about the case.
51. INSERT - Footage from Idrizovo prison: walls, a watchtower, guards.
52. INSERT - Footage of a prison cell. Laundry hangs between the beds. A dirty hotplate and grimy pots sit on the floor.
53. INSERT - Footage of Idrizovo hallways. They're crowded with prisoners who are filthy and high on drugs.
54. Kanarinka says that she met one of the killers' mothers in a hospital and started a fight with the woman. Now, she says, she regrets doing so, but it's too late to make amends.
55. Overwhelmed by misfortune, Kanarinka remains modest and kind.

Editor's Note

The preceding excerpt includes Mothers' entire first act and a selection of scenes from the second. As Andrew Horton notes in his response to the film, Manchevski presents the film's third act as a documentary. The excerpt presents the first segment of this third, documentary-style act as a montage formatted in the style of early 20th century scenarios. See, for example, Georges Méliès' scenario Le voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon).

Versions of this scenario can be found in various places, for example, online: Tim Dirks, "Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip To The Moon) (1902)" (filmsite, n.d. http://www.filmsite.org/voya.html [1 January 2010]), and, in print: Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film (Harcourt Brace, 1939), 27-28 and Kevin Alexander Boon, Script Culture and the American Screenplay (Wayne State UP, 2008), 5.

The original French version of Méliès' scenario can be found reprinted in the November 1984 issue of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris).

~ Q.M. for SCRIPTjr.nl

Production Stills