Lioness

SYNOPSIS

Helena is a paramedic, a professional caretaker who paradoxically doesn’t know how to care for her teenage daughter Stefi when she gets on a dangerous and self-destructive path. As a woman of action rather than talk, Helena prepares an extreme plan to secretly kidnap and lock the girl up, far away from all the bad world. But things don’t work out as planned. An unexpected chain of events throws Helena into a state of shock and forces her to find an entirely new meaning for her motherly love.

Helena, a strong and efficient woman is an experienced paramedic, who has no trouble handling the practical details of everyday life. Due to her work she’s well aware of what happens behind closed doors and under the cover of the night. However, the fact that she has emotionally abandoned her daughter long ago has gone unnoticed.

A NOTE FROM THE MAKERS

We live in a time when the mental health of parents and children is under enormous pressure —high expectations, fears, anxiety, relationship issues at home, work, and school. The characters in Lioness are, in a way, collective portraits of all of us. A teenager who doesn’t fit in at school nor at home, who has no real friends, and who, in the absence of love and approval, becomes an easy prey for manipulators. A friendship that turns out to be a power play and bullying instead. Violence used to mask emptiness and inner pain. A father who desperately wants to fix everything but lacks the courage to face the core of the issue.

A mother who soothes her loneliness through constant activity and helping others—bandaging bleeding wounds, mending broken bones, and reviving hearts. But when it comes to helping herself and her dearest loved one, she doesn’t know how.

We are together, yet alone. We love each other but don’t know how to express it in a way that it feels like love to the loved one.

As filmmakers, with Lioness we want to deeply shake the audience — to force us to rethink our education system, our mental health support structures, to urge parents to look in the mirror, and to help young people see their parents from a different perspective. We believe that loneliness and anguish need to be fought, and difficult issues don’t disappear by ignoring them. Action is required, and we take action by telling stories through film.

The intricate, yet real-life events and characters portrayed in an artistic, even exaggerated way, provide a safe space for everyone to reflect and make changes in their lives—before it’s too late.