Maria Montessori

Léa Todorov's emotional drama MARIA MONTESSORI is a long overdue and deeply moving memorial to the educational icon. With great visual elegance, she shows the eponym of one of the most influential educational movements in all her strength and inner turmoil.

Philosopher, educator, mother: the world-famous icon Maria Montessori lived a self-determined but also dramatic life. When the unmarried Maria Montessori made the decision in 1901 to leave her two-year-old son Mario for an indefinite period in order to develop a new vision of education as a modern and free woman, she sensed that she was about to spark a revolution. In an institute she founded for disabled children, she developed learning methods that later made history and were driven by one thought: as long as you love the children, they can learn anything. It is not discipline, but their freedom that will show what treasures are hidden in the children. But of course she doesn't receive a salary as head of the institute, her partner Montesano takes the credit, and it's all about breaking the resistance of the male scientific elite. There is no way to finally take her son home in this world. Maria takes little Tina, the daughter of prostitute Lili d'Alengy, into her institute. The girl blossoms here and Maria and Lili become fateful allies. It is only thanks to the prostitute that Maria enters the world in which money distributes power. The two women forge a joint network that not only enables independence, but above all a pedagogy that believes in the autonomy of the mind.