Earth Mama review – new talent arrives on the scene fully-formed

There’s one pleasure that this job never loses, and that’s the thrill of witnessing a new talent arrive on the scene fully-formed. On the evidence of the astonishingly-assured debut, Earth Mama, we’ll be seeing work from writer-director Savanah Leaf for many years to come.

What this film does is tell a time-worn tale in the neorealist mould – here, of a woman working with and battling against a bureaucratic system that has forcibly partitioned her from her two children – and brings something completely fresh to the table in the mode of delivery. Leaf develops a series of interwoven tableaux which emphasises the crushingly familiar circles that the pregnant Gia (Tia Nomore) is being forced to run in.

It picks a little at documentary too, in scenes of a support group that Gia attends whose members try and convince her to stay strong against the torrent of adversity. There’s a social-realist core to both the film’s dramatic and political concerns, yet many passages of Earth Mama come across with almost dreamlike tranquility, with Leaf as interested in capturing moments of intense circumspection as she is the heated conversations with friends and so-called helpers.

It’s an achingly sad film, not that any sense of sadness is projected directly at the screen. It’s more Gia’s realisation that she is trapped inside a labyrinth that may not have an exit. Though the film is implicitly critical of the state-sanctioned trauma that has been imposed on Gia, it does not take out the human workers as collateral. But this is must-see filmmaking from an exciting new talent who doesn’t need tricks or bombast to get her vital point across.

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