Behind “MOTHER”

MOTHER began with one very specific image: a pregnant mannequin. Before thinking about the store or the visual style, what interested me was that contradiction — a plastic body, created to be seen, carrying an image of motherhood. A mannequin has no biology, no desire, and no personal history, but the moment we see her pregnant, we immediately project ideas of life, waiting, care, and femininity onto her.

The emotional core of the short appears when something like an instinct to care begins to awaken in her. When she approaches the child mannequin and places a small hat on him, she is trying to perform a maternal, delicate, human gesture. But in that same moment, she also discovers her own limitation: her rigid, imperfect, artificial anatomy was not made to care — it was made to pose. What should be a tender gesture becomes clumsy and tragic. For me, that tension defines the film: a figure built to represent motherhood, but unable to truly inhabit it.

I didn’t want to make a horror film. I was more interested in creating a quiet, strange psychological drama, almost entirely told from the mannequin’s point of view. That is why the film has very little dialogue. She cannot explain what is happening to her; everything had to be built through small gestures, pauses, stiffness, and the way she looks at or touches things. The emotion had to appear like a small crack inside an object.

The old department store became the perfect space for this story: a world of displays, clothing, lights, reflections, and consumer desire, where everything is designed to be exhibited. Even at night, the lights remain on. Nothing is truly hidden. The mannequin exists inside that permanent exposure: she was made to be seen, not to feel.

For me, artificial intelligence was only a tool inside a process that was very close to a traditional film production. First came the idea, then the characters, the script, the storyboard, the direction of each shot, the editing, the sound, and the color. Flick was essential in keeping that process organized. I worked entirely inside Flick, using the infinite canvas to generate, compare, and organize images, build the story shot by shot, and decide which takes had the strongest emotional and narrative coherence.

It was also extremely valuable to work with different engines inside the same environment. For video, I mainly used Seedance 2.0 and Gemini OmniFlash; for images, I mostly used GPT Image 2, because it gave me a texture that felt close to the kind of cinema I wanted to make. After that, everything went through an extensive editing process in DaVinci Resolve, where I worked on rhythm, continuity, color, and atmosphere.

I feel very fortunate to be the first filmmaker to create the first Flick Originals film. For me, MOTHER represents the kind of cinema that can emerge when technology is placed in service of a clear idea. Beyond AI, what holds the short together is the same thing that holds any film together: a powerful initial image, a precise emotional intention, and many creative decisions made with care.