Documentaries are strange beasts. Real life is not as simple as Hollywood movies, and sometimes you have to film your subjects for years until the story plays out. Who can follow anything for such a length of time with cameras and microphones? Longer time spans increase the chances that you won’t be rolling when the critical moment occurs. Somehow the team behind Love Child managed to catch an extraordinary wealth of surprises, key moments, and emotion. Partly it is due to the extremely open and photogenic family, who seems completely at ease in front of the camera. It also helps that they allowed therapy sessions to be filmed where they tell their life stories, confront their emotions, and reveal some of their deepest secrets. But their’s no substitute for being there, and the family and crew deserve extraordinary credit for upending their lives and allowing countless of hours of filming, sometimes at great risk.
“…an extraordinary wealth of surprises, key moments, and emotion…whipsawing between terror, exhilaration, love, bitterness, loneliness, and belonging.”
Love Child may well be an Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary, and deservedly so. But more than any other film in recent memory, it deserves an award for editing. I cannot conceive of how they took what must be thousands of hours of footage and distilled it into a tight, brisk sub-two-hour run time with a strong narrative. Despite the heavy subject matter playing out over a protracted time period, this is not a ponderous film. It is a roller-coaster of emotion, whipsawing between terror, exhilaration, love, bitterness, loneliness, and belonging.
In films like these, there can be a temptation to put refugees on a pedestal. Thankfully, director Eva Mulvad eschews this trap, and present her subjects as they truly are. Sometimes they’re afraid, sometimes they’re mean, and they may have made mistakes in the past. But those serve as excellent counterpoints to their capacity for love and hope. Once in a while, a documentary can peel back the layers and get at the core of what it means to be human in a way that a feature film can only approximate. Love Child is just such an extraordinary film.
Love Child had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
"…he’s the product of adultery, punishable by death in Iran."
