The Goddess

Cairo Publishing

The Goddess

10.000 B.C.: the dawn of the Neolithic era rises on the lands that will be called Mesopotamia. In the village of Zewi Khemi, the Goddess rules humanity and her merciless law is administered by Venerable Mother Aster who speaks in her name. The women subdue the men through fear: it is the survival of the tribes themselves that requires this. The big herds of bison no longer tread the vast prairies, hunting no longer feeds the people. There have been too many famines, too many mothers who had to sacrifice their little ones to sustain the adults. The men no longer take up their spears, not even to make war. Now they are forced to shepherd the flocks. Obtaining the fruits of the earth means the difference between living and dying, and only the women know how to do this. They are the only ones who can give life and the only ones who can take it away. Only the women can decree that the time of migrations and tribal wars have come to an end and impose a forced peace beneath the implacable gaze of the mythical Goddess. But there is a terrible secret that must never be revealed, a lethal truth that could overturn the steely female order. Only Aster, like the other Venerable Mothers before her, carries its burden until the moment when she passes on to her granddaughter Uriel the long leather skirt and the precious cowry shells, symbols of absolute power. And it is Uriel, the beautiful warrior, who will have to protect her ancestral world from Ahkim, the fiercest of all the males, who desires a bloody revenge. And while Koshmar the Gimp – the man cast out by the other men – and Mara of the river people break a taboo, the final clash is prepared that will decide the destiny of the entire human race. Perhaps forever. In this colossal of prehistory, Lorenzo Mediano’s characters embody the rites, the passions, the furious battle for power and blind desire to survive of a group of humans in an era of extraordinary upheavals that made us what we are. Violence, taboos, magic and the overwhelming discovery of love come to life with a cinematographic realism that finally gives faces, voices and feelings to the progenitors of our species.