A Mother’s Land

A film by Ayala Sharot

A Mother’s Land image

About the project:

When Israeli filmmaker Ayala Sharot’s young son begins having recurring nightmares, she sets out to understand where his fear comes from. What begins as a mother’s attempt to comfort her child becomes a journey across four generations of one family, tracing how fear, memory, and history pass from mother to child.


The search first brings Ayala to her father, Danny, a child psychologist who was raised in a 1950s kibbutz children’s house, when children slept apart from their parents in the name of collective ideals. It then leads her to Miriam, her grandmother, a Jewish girl from Detroit who fell in love with the Zionist dream and left America to build a life in Israel.

Decades later, Ayala is raising her own child in the country Miriam chose. Through intimate family encounters, archival traces, and dreamlike hand-drawn animation, the film moves between past and present, between Israel and America, and between the private world of motherhood and the larger dreams that shaped Jewish families on both sides of the ocean. As the story unfolds, the film brings forward the women’s side of that history, and the choices and silences that shaped the family across generations.

At its heart, A Mother’s Land is a personal film about motherhood, inheritance, and the fragile bond between the American Jewish dream of Israel and the reality of raising a child there today. Through one family’s story, it opens a larger conversation about fear, belonging, and the price of calling a place home.