Àma Gloria – Gorgeous domestic drama on the meaning of parenthood

It’s with remarkable simplicity and tact that Marie Amachoukeli crafts her debut feature into a layered meditation on maternal love and a child’s experience with grief. She lends the point of view of her film entirely to sixy ear-old Cléo (Louise Mauroy-Panzani), a young, wide-eyed girl living in Paris with her widowed father (Arnaud Rebotini), while being raised mostly by her nanny, Gloria (Ilça Moreno Zego), in the absence of her late mother.

There’s a lot here about belonging too: about class; power dynamics; and the colonial lingerings that continue to seep into the material realities of domestic labour and childcare – roles that women from the Global South have to rely on to provide for their families back home. Amachoukeli isn’t too concerned with developing a stance towards these complex realities – after all, they lie well outside the comprehension of our young protagonist, but she touches upon them with nuance nonetheless. When tragedy strikes in Gloria’s native Cape Verde, she must urgently return to care for the family she left behind. This news comes as a devastating shock to Cléo, whose whole world revolves around her beloved guardian.

Yet her father is quick to assuage her sorrow by promising that she can visit Gloria over the summer holidays. She embarks on the long journey, but in Cape Verde, Cléo comes to realise that she is no longer at the centre of Gloria’s attention, that she has a life outside of raising her: a home; a family; a new grandchild on the way. Gloria’s own children, dismissive towards their mother whose profession meant that she was away during formative years, are resentful of this young interloper, but slowly come to accept that it’s not Cléo who is at fault for their mother’s absence.

She is but another victim of circumstance within a system that forces mothers away from their homes for stable, reliable incomes. It is astonishing how Amachoukeli draws out such a strikingly complex, emotional and commanding performance from the young Mauroy-Panzani. We experience things through her sheltered eyes, with a (sometimes over-)reliance on tight frames and close-ups employed to lay bare how we see and feel our way through the world as small children: full of curiosity, vulnerability and naiveté, with no grasp of a ​“bigger picture”.

But it’s not all innocence, there are dark feelings in children’s complex little hearts too: jealousy, possessiveness, spite – tricky emotions that surface as a means to grapple with the pain of realising you’re not at the centre of someone’s universe, even if they are to yours. Moreno Zego’s performance as the titular Gloria is equally layered, and the relationship between the two feels truly genuine and lived-in.

Dreamlike sequences of hand-painted stop motion animation in watery tones periodically punctuate the film, and the effect is quite beautiful. The mixed media technique cuts through the film’s naturalism to bring forth something felt and ineffable, akin to the rich, vivid worlds within children’s imaginations, as well as the haziness with which we recall childhood memories.