Polish director Katarzyna Roslaniec follows her controversial, irresistibly scrappy debut Mall Girls with this edgy and disarmingly frank look at teen pregnancy. A stylish amalgam of postmodern hip and retro cool, 17 year old Natalia (Magdalena Berus) nonchalantly roller-skates her way along the sidewalks of Warsaw ignoring the judgmental looks cast her way, the very picture of teenage rebellion, except for the pram she pushes in front of her. Where the future once belonged to her, it’s now been passed on to the tiny bundle in her arms: having recently given birth to a baby boy named Antek, Natalia finds she must now juggle youthful desires with adult responsibilities, particularly as Kuba (Nikodem Rozbicki), the child’s fresh-faced, eighteen-year-old father, is often just as happy to smoke dope and skateboard with his friends as he is to babysit. Temptation is never far away when you’re seventeen, and despite the fact that Natalia is in many ways a good mother, there are moments when that itch needs scratching.
"Baby Blues is far more than just another in the long line of films about teen pregnancy. As Natalia’s situation spirals progressively further out of control, Roslaniec sidesteps the mini-genre’s clichés and manufactured crises, showing with both empathy and unremitting clarity the tremendous challenges facing youth whose uncontrollable desires thrust them into a world of sudden, unavoidable maturity." (Piers Handling, TIFF)
“Unlike many films about teenage mothers, Baby Blues is anything but a piece of gloomy social realism. Instead, it is an exhilarating ride through a garishly coloured world of clothes, sex and drugs and a ribald look at Poland's fledgling capitalism.” (Berlin IFF)
-Kier-la Janisse
Plays with the short film:
MAI
Maria Reinup | Estonia 2013 | 16mins. | Print Source: Maria Reinup
Young Mai finds herself alone in the last bus to the city with 2 drug
addicts, one of them in a quickly deteriorating situation. Failing to
win the attention of the driver or the fellow passengers, she decides
to intervene herself.