MOTHERS OF INVENTION
feature length documentary in development
A woman is packing expensive scientific equipment into moving boxes. The lab is almost empty. Almost in passing, she mentions that she has gone bankrupt and she has to be out by Friday.
Her nine-month-old son is on her hip. The phone rings - someone is explaining how to dismantle precision instruments she never thought she would own in the first place.
This is what invention actually looks like before history decides whether it matters.
LOGLINE
Over several years, MOTHERS OF INVENTION follows women inventors and founders trying to bring something radically new into the world while simultaneously carrying children, debt, exhaustion, care work, doubt, and the constant possibility of failure.
The film moves through laboratories, investor meetings, shared flats, hospital rooms, kitchens, sports halls and late-night work sessions - observing invention not as a heroic breakthrough, but as a prolonged state of instability.
At its core, the film asks:
Who gets to invent the future? And under which conditions?
THE FILM
We are used to seeing innovation through the mythology of disruption: visionary founders, charismatic geniuses, exponential growth.
Most invention doesn't happen like that. It happens quietly, precariously, repeatedly close to collapse. And when women invent, the conditions are often even more contradictory: they are expected to innovate fearlessly while simultaneously stabilising the lives around them.
What interests me is not the success story.
The film is constantly identifying friction: between care and ambition, between bodies and systems, between invention and survival.
Our protagonists are not symbolic figures or role models. They are women inside processes whose outcomes remain uncertain throughout the film. Whether their ideas, whether their companies will survive is something even the film doesn't know. That uncertainty is essential.
DEVELOPMENT SUPPORTED BY
