Here is a deeply felt social-realist movie performed with integrity and calm by west coast rapper and musician Tia Nomore making her acting debut. Writer-director Savanah Leaf is herself making her feature directing debut, having developed this project from a short film made with Taylor Russell. Leaf is a former music video director and, London-born, competed in the 2012 London Olympics as a volleyball player and so, remarkably, becomes the first Team GB graduate to make a film for the ultra-hip studio A24.
Nomore plays Gia, a young African American woman from the Bay Area who has two children in foster care; she is in recovery from drug abuse and is repeatedly late for supervised contact sessions with the children and for the various court-ordered courses she is required to undertake. This, as she keeps pointing out, is because of the jobs she has to hold down; part of her grim and humiliating task of proving that she is a decent mother and human being.
Added to this, she is pregnant again, outside of anything resembling a stable relationship – to the profound but tacit disapproval of the childcare authorities whose control over her life Gia seethingly resents. Gia is angry, but Nomore shows us someone with dignity and intelligence. Each time she makes a phone call her credit diminishes: a blank robot voice tells her – and us – about her dwindling supply of money, a continuous thread of anxiety.
Interestingly, Gia’s job is in a photographer’s studio and she has to help set up various portraits; the action is punctuated by these tableaux of family groups, the kind of group from which Gia is excluded. (Leaf has said that she is inspired by Ken Loach; I wonder if she also took something from Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies from 1996, in which Timothy Spall’s portrait photographer creates images interspersed in the action in a comparable way.)
Gia’s life – and in fact her whole being – comes to a crisis when she decides to give this third child up for adoption, to the fury of some of her friend-group and supportive approval of others. Is this decision a mature and realistic way of getting on with her life, and placating the authorities who stand between Gia and regaining custody of the other two children? Or is it a profound defeat, a loss of one of the few human rights she has left – her rights as a mother? The film offers no easy answers, but gives us a flawed but deeply sympathetic woman, who continues to make mistakes but is a survivor, not someone pitched into a defeatist tragedy of self-immolation and self-harm. A piercingly emotional drama, acted with natural flair.
Earth Mama is released on 8 December in UK cinemas.
