Love Child

Year: 2019

Duration: 112 min

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.—Toronto International Film Festival

Genre: Documentary   Drama