At Millennium Docs Against Gravity, Wiktoria Davis Szymańska is pitching her highly personal No Mother’s Land, a 90-minute UK-Poland-France co-production that turns the filmmaker’s own decade-long ordeal into a hybrid documentary drama about motherhood, justice, coercive control and the limits of international law.
The project is one of 11 works selected for the Progress Pitching Session at MDAG, unspooling on 8 May in Warsaw. The industry event will connect creative documentary projects with Polish and international producers, investors, sales agents, distributors and festival programmers.
For Szymańska, the pitch also marks a decisive step in bringing to the screen a story she began filming long before it could be safely told.
No Mother’s Land follows the filmmaker after she is falsely accused of abducting her daughter Maia, and becomes trapped in a cross-border legal nightmare. The documentary retraces more than 11 years of their lives, combining archive material shot between 2014 and 2025 with newly filmed scenes, interviews, legal documents, reconstructions and observational footage across France, the UK, Ireland, Germany and Poland.
The pic’s logline describes “the gripping decade-long ordeal of a mother/filmmaker protecting her daughter, trapped in a Kafkaesque legal nightmare.” Its synopsis details a story of surveillance, intimidation, endless trials, cross-border arrests and years spent in hiding, while Szymańska fights to protect her child and reclaim a life she says was “erased”.
The documentary is conceived as both an intimate mother-daughter survival story and a wider examination of the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. In the project materials, the filmmakers argue that a mechanism designed to protect children can, in some cases, be exploited through legal loopholes and used against women and children fleeing coercive control or domestic violence.
“This is a story that should never have happened,” Szymańska says in her director’s statement. “It is a testimony of a mother’s fight for human rights and children’s rights, for motherhood, for childhood and for the right to live without fear.”
The film will not be structured as a conventional legal exposé. Szymańska plans to combine present-day vérité, direct-to-camera confession, witness testimonies, personal archive, digital evidence and high-tension reconstructions of arrests, escapes and court proceedings. The project’s visual language is intended to mirror what the director describes as the fragmentation and psychological pressure of living under legal siege.
The project materials outline a non-linear structure that moves between memory, fear and survival. The opening evokes the early magic of motherhood through Super 8-style images, Paris rooftops, travel, music festivals and Maia’s childhood, before the story darkens into accusations, police summonses and courtrooms. Later sequences are expected to revisit safe houses, ferry routes, trains, lawyers’ offices and the landscapes where mother and daughter hid, waited or attempted to rebuild a sense of ordinary life.
“I want the audience to engage, understand the facts, but most of all, to feel the emotional landscape of this experience: the absolute helplessness in the face of a broken system, the constant tension of daily survival,” Szymańska says.
The personal urgency of the project is heightened by Maia’s age. Now 11, she has given her consent for the film to be made, according to the director. “My daughter asked me to tell our story,” Szymańska says. “Now that I am free to return to life, new obstacles and realities are challenging. Living in the aftermath of stolen years requires constant adjustment.”
Szymańska adds that the film must be made now, as Maia moves from childhood into adolescence. The team also hopes to urgently film interviews with elderly and fragile witnesses, while continuing to document Maia as she grows. The confirmed contributors include childhood friends, collaborators, legal contacts and members of the Hague Mothers group, with the production also planning a broader finale in which other women share similar experiences.
The film’s budget is €660,000, of which €350,000 has been secured from the Polish Film Institute (PISF). The team is currently seeking partners to complete the financing, support the editing phase and enable further shooting. Before working with producers, Szymańska had already filmed in France, the UK, Germany and Poland, gathering extensive footage and access to legal experts.
“With Monika (Braid, producer], we secured PISF funding. We are now looking for partners to join us on this journey — through motherhood and childhood — with moments of resilience and beauty.”
Szymańska is a director, multimedia artist and writer whose work spans documentary, fiction and experimental forms. She has previously made award-winning films including Themerson and Themerson – which traces the love story of the creative duo which toured the world for many years together – and The Man Who Made Angels Fly. Her short fiction film 7 Sheep premiered at Toronto TIFF and screened at more than 40 international festivals.
The production is also developing an impact strategy through Think Film, aimed at audiences, women’s rights organisations, legal professionals, policy makers and educational institutions. The project materials cite Hague Mothers as a primary partner, and envisage screenings not only at festivals, but also in legal, parliamentary and advocacy contexts.
For Szymańska, however, the film remains rooted in the mother-daughter bond at the centre of the story.
The team is aiming for a major international festival launch, with the production strategy also targeting broadcasters, streamers, arthouse distributors and educational partners.
