Writers: Ana Rocha de Sousa, Paula Vaccaro, Aaron Brookner
Director: Ana Rocha de Sousa
Any film involving the UK’s social services rarely shows the organisation in a positive light – see anything by Ken Loach – and so it proves in Ana Rocha de Sousa’s Listen which has its UK premiere at the Raindance Festival 2021. Focusing on a group of children removed from their Portuguese parents, this is a film about the intractability of a blunted system that sometimes does more damage to the very children it is trying to protect.
When Lucy’s hearing aid breaks and she is late for school again, mum Bela and father Jota struggle to keep their heads above water with no money coming in. When a teacher notices some mysterious bruises on Lucy’s body, social services intervene and remove her along with elder brother Diego and baby Jessy from the couple. Knowing that Lucy’s needs aren’t being met by the care facility, Bela and Jota fight to get their children back.
Rocha de Sousa’s layered and powerful film explores a welfare system that leaves no room for complexity and a structure that offers little comfort or support to the families it was designed to protect. And Listen paints a picture of extreme poverty through no fault of their own as Jota endure a zero hours contract that yields little pay and Bela is reduced to shoplifting to feed her children in the functional but rundown house they occupy.
The pressures on this family start to pile-up from the start and where services like Lucy’s school could offer help, instead Bela receives only surface judgements bases on rigid stereotypes. The shock and suddenness of the Emergency Protection Order is, Rocha de Sousa pointedly notes, couched in this almost militant attitude where nuance and circumstance or even Bela and Jota’s point of view are flattened by a one-size-fits-all approach that leads to children mistakenly being taken from their parents and never returned.
Lucia Moniz as mum Bela is beaten down by the family’s limited budget and tries to find corners to cut without alerting the authorities to their struggle. Moniz captures Bela’s already frazzled character which becomes hysterical and, eventually, broken by the events of the film but without ever losing the certainty that she is a good, caring mother who just doesn’t know which way to turn.
Jota’s backstory is largely implied, a talented artist working in a manual role with an unscrupulous boss whose frustrations sometimes boil over in arguments both within and outside the household. But like Bela, Ruben Garcia suggests Jota’s devotion to his children and support for his wife as they navigate the emotional minefield of the welfare system.
The social justice angle in Listen accords with similar social service films but the story adds a dramatic drive by looking at ways the couple must manage and bypass the system to reunite their family, with support from Sophia Myles’ activist Ann. It may be rather one-sided, but this is a film about the human consequences of a faceless UK system;Listen says plenty of things we need to hear.
Listen is screening at the Raindance Film Festival on 30 October.
The Reviews Hub Score:
Layered and powerful
