Writer and Director: Adura Onashile
The 2023 BFI London Film Festival has a particular focus on motherhood this year with Scottish feature Girl exploring a complex parent-child relationship, immigrant families thrown into the UK’s social care system and maternal mental health. Adura Onashile’s 90-minute movie has a tender but potentially controlling relationship at its centre and the investigation of Grace’s possibly over-protective approach to daughter Ama is nicely in balance with her own fears about getting too close to the people around them.
Living in a tower block in Glasgow, mum Grace works as a nightshift cleaner leaving her 11-year-old daughter to take care of herself. Troubled by moments of depression, Grace is alarmed when Ama makes friends with a neighbour and begins spending time with her in and out of school. With the social services keen to interview them both, the pair drifting apart with Grace clinging even tighter than before.
Onashile’s tightly managed film is built carefully around the two quite different perspectives and follows Grace and Ama through the separate experiences of their days, and both are well developed, often sensitive trajectories. Grace’s story is the more ambiguous and emotive, hints at past trauma and emotional damage which, Girl implies, links to the circumstances of Ama’s birth and the experience before moving – or possibly escaping – to the UK. Grace is living a half life as a result, hiding from intruders and strangers, sleeping exhaustedly at odd times and, as the story unfolds, struggling to stay focused. The dual presentation of her fear and loss of control is particularly well managed and Onashile’s camera captures someone isolated and excluded from the stark cityscape but equally absenting herself, retreating into a protective shell.
Ama’s point of view is just as well drawn, a softer strand that experiences childhood in a slightly wonderous way while confronting an adult world of pain and anger that she never quite understands. Ama’s growing friendship with neighbour Fiona (Liana Turner) is lovely, an innocence that focuses around play and a rare opportunity for fun and freedom in which Ama starts to learn more about herself away from her mother. But it is the understanding of control that makes this relationship so interesting, responding to the emotional manipulation of her mother and experiencing guilt as a result.
With immersive performances from Déborah Lukumuena as Grance and Le’Shantey Bonsu as Ama, Girl ultimately asks more questions that it answers about the backstory of this mother-daughter relationship and why they ended up in this city afraid to interact with those around them. But as a portrait of complex motherhood and mental health, Onashile captures isolation and sense of abandonment affecting people in a forgotten corner of our society, where even those trying to help might make things worse.
Girl is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023.
