Mama Illegal

Inhabitants of poverty-stricken Moldavia sacrifice their savings and risk their lives to become illegal aliens abroad. The film follows three women from this small neighbor of Romania, who work illegally as cleaners in Austria and Italy. Some of these workers have been separated from their children and family for many years. They have no rights to medical assistance and also run the risk of being deported. We also see people who stayed at home in Moldavia, as they demonstrate how to cross the border by hanging beneath a train. We also meet them after perilous journeys out of the country, having slipped into Romania, just out of sight of the watchtowers. Everyone is dreaming of a better home, of parquet floors and televisions that the women will finance upon their return. But the price is high. The women's stories are distressing: they hardly know their own children, but they have given up everything to provide them with a better future. And back home in Moldavia, family members wish they had never let their wives and mothers go. Meanwhile, these amputated families try to survive in primitive, rural Moldavia. This is a melancholy portrait of the desperate inhabitants of a little piece of the Third World in Europe.