This is a really emotional documentary. You watch the child grow from a small boy who is pretty confused and doesn't accept his dad to a sweet and happy child who speaks three languages and appears to be thriving despite of the limbo in which they live. You can feel the desperate hope of the parents as they fight to move somewhere to be free, to be openly themselves. To no longer be "stateless". Kind people, educated professionals, refugees. I am very moved by their story and want to be able to help them somehow.
Love Child
2019
Documentary / Drama
Love Child
2019
Documentary / Drama
Plot summary
Tensions run high from the opening minutes of this film. A desperate man in Tehran speaks to the camera: "I'm not sure if, tomorrow, I'll be dead or alive." This is Sahand, who has been in a long-term adulterous relationship with Leila, despite Iran's threat of the death penalty for infidelity. Now, the couple is fleeing the country with Mani, their four-year-old love child. Danish documentary filmmaker Eva Mulvad follows the family as they go into exile in Turkey and then enter United Nations bureaucratic limbo. They have the bad luck to start their journey in 2012, just as the Syrian Civil War is creating a mass wave of refugees; their case is pushed further down the list. Sahand and Leila are sympathetic and compelling figures on screen, keeping control of their negative emotions, as many parents do with children around. But they are quick to display joy, as revealed by the film's small moments: a birthday party, buying a bicycle, getting a job. As the years go by, their fate rests on whether they have the right paperwork: paternity test results, divorce certificates, and evidence of persecution. We gradually peel back the layers of their complicated past.
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