Horror Obsessive
Folk horror has a mythology problem. Too many films invent a pagan rite from whole cloth, dress it in wicker and candlelight, and hope atmosphere covers for the fact that nothing on screen actually comes from anywhere real. Motherwitch does the opposite. It reaches into a documented, specific piece of Cypriot folklore, the Kalikantzari, and asks what happens when a mother’s grief opens a door those spirits have been waiting behind for centuries.
Written and directed by Minos Papas, the film had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam earlier this year after a stop at the Cannes Frontieres Buyers Showcase in 2025. It makes its North American premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival on Thursday, July 30, arriving with a new trailer and poster that lean into gothic, painterly dread rather than jump-scare marketing.
A Curse Rooted in Cypriot Folklore
Per the film’s official synopsis, Motherwitch is set in Cyprus in 1882, where Eleni (Margarita Zachariou), a French-educated painter, loses her three children when a chapel wall collapses on them. Branded cursed by her village under uneasy English colonial rule, she burns her paintings and withdraws from life until a boy named Michalakis (Sifis Katsoulakis, credited in an introducing role) pulls her back into a ritual meant to resurrect her children through art itself. What she wakes instead are the Kalikantzari, described in the film’s synopsis as cruel, mischievous spirits of Cypriot folklore.
The detail that sticks here: Kalikantzari folklore ties these spirits to the window between Christmas and Epiphany, when older Greek and Cypriot tradition holds that the boundary between worlds thins. Motherwitch does not invent a mythology to serve its plot. It opens a door that grandmothers on the island have been warning children about for generations, then sends a grieving mother straight through it.
A Filmmaker Working Through Real Grief
Papas has said the project grew out of years spent listening to bereaved parents, and his prior work with the Cameron Kravitt Foundation and the Patton Veterans Project shaped how the film treats mourning as something a person has to survive, not just suffer through. That research shows in the film’s insistence that grief itself, not a monster in the traditional sense, is the real threat. Lamia (Danai Katsameni), the demon Eleni ultimately confronts in the village ruins, is described in the film’s own synopsis as a gorgon-like mother figure who feeds on loss rather than flesh.
Shot entirely on location in an uninhabited fifteenth-century village in Cyprus, and backed by co-producers based in New York and North Macedonia, Motherwitch is a small-scale production punching well above its budget on atmosphere alone. That is the version of folk horror worth paying attention to: not a genre costume assembled for mood, but a filmmaker using inherited, regionally specific myth to say something pointed about what grief does to the people left standing after it.
Whether the film lands with North American horror audiences the way it has on the festival circuit remains to be seen, but a story willing to sit inside real, documented folklore instead of borrowing the aesthetics of one earns the Fantasia spotlight it is about to get.
Quick Takes
- Motherwitch makes its North American premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival on Thursday, July 30.
- The film had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2026 after playing the Cannes Frontieres Buyers Showcase in 2025.
- Minos Papas wrote and directed the film, drawing on Cypriot Kalikantzari folklore for its central threat.
- Margarita Zachariou stars as Eleni, a grieving mother whose ritual to resurrect her children unleashes the spirits.
- Motherwitch is a Cyprus, North Macedonia, and United States co-production shot entirely on location in Cyprus.
