When one sees enough festival films, certain patterns begin to emerge. This isn’t in reference to the thematic ones that are often articulated in critics’ festival reports, along the lines of “this was a big year for close-up examinations of the toll taken by global capital.” (Is it ever not a big year for that?) No, more specifically, this is referring to formal patterns that tend to traverse genres and national boundaries, ones that speak less to the Zeitgeist and more to the particular structures of international funding, production workshops, and the various institutional mechanisms that assist first-time directors in getting their debuts out to the circuit. Mama, by Israel’s Or Sinai, is a perfectly respectable, low-key drama about Mila (Evgenia Dodina), a middle-aged Pole who works as a domestic employee in the home of some well-to-do Israelis. The film makes some cogent observations about familial expectations, the pull of tradition, and indeed, the toll taken by global capital. But something gets lost along the way.
Mila’s family is back in Poland. She has been away from her husband, Anton (Arkadiusz Jakubik), and college-age daughter, Kasia (Katarzyna Łubik), for several years. When Mila has an accident and injures her wrist, her employers decide that she should spend her time off going back home, where she can presumably recuperate in peace. But upon her return, she discovers that life has gone on without her, in ways that her family has not necessarily felt the need to share. The cynical reading of this is that Anton and Kasia want Mila to keep sending money back home; the generous reading is that they don’t want to stress her out about problems she’s in no position to solve. To Sinai’s credit, she shows that the truth of the situation is a mixture of the two. It’s also to Mama’s credit that it treats Mila and Anton as reasonable adults, despite the small-town setting. Mila has taken a lover (Martin Ogbu) in Israel, and Anton has taken up with a local woman, Natasha (Dominika Bednarczyk), who has gradually insinuated her way into the family. While these decisions are a point of contention, there is no double standard. “You’re with someone, I know you are,” Anton tells Mila, “and so was I.”
But the primary conflict has to do with Kasia’s plans. Mila has been working to make sure her daughter stays in college in Krakow, to get a degree in computer programming so that she “won’t end up like me.” Kasia has other plans, including marrying her boyfriend and quitting school. These changes are the result of an unplanned pregnancy, which Mila very much wants Kasia to terminate. (While abortion is illegal in Poland, there are clinics on the Czechian border that cater specifically to Polish women.) But it’s here that Sinai loses the plot. There is a deeply troubling turn of events when Kasia gets an ultrasound and discovers the fetus has fatal abnormalities. Kasia is crushed, and Mila is in the awkward position of getting what she wants, but not in the way she wanted it. She seems almost sorry, and resolute in helping Kasia through this tragedy.
But then there’s a twist. It’s the kind of twist that undergraduates put in their short stories, the kind that screenwriters throw in when someone has given them notes about “third act problems.” Mama completely undoes the messy, ambivalent emotions that Mila, Kasia, and Anton are grappling with, and the impact nearly tanks the film entirely. This is a shame, because Mama is well-acted, with skillful but unfussy cinematography and an admirably plainspoken tone. Sinai manages to convey the cultural and atmospheric distance between Israel and Poland without sanitizing the former or provincializing the latter. The film constructs a world filled with real, imperfect people, sometimes blinded by their own good intentions. And with one ill-conceived revelation, Mama blows it all to hell.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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