So as promised, I will be continuing from my last post, reviewing films from the film festival that deals with single parenting and children from broken homes.
Hope you all read my last blog post on Behaviour by guest blogger Olivia Andrews.
If not, click here to go to post.
Now moving on, the next movie that I’ll be looking at is Pelo Malo.
I loved this movie, it raised so many issues on parenting, it was definitely worth watching.
This 93 minute Narrative Feature was directed by Mariana Rondón. The film is a Venezuelan film and is in Spanish with English Subtitles.
The films tells the story of a young boy by the name of Junior, who lives in a small, old apartment with his mother, Marta. Fired from her job as a security guard, Marta becomes desperate and is seen everyday trying to meet her boss to get back her work. Junior, meanwhile, is obsessed with straightening his curly hair. Junior's fascination with straight hair irks his mother, where she begins to think that her son may be gay and even goes as far as taking her son to a doctor in a wave of homophobic panic. Junior's constant need to have straight hair strains the already fragile relationship between mother and son.
Like all children, Junior just wants love, attention and approval from his mother and well to have straight hair. I don't think the child is gay, he's just fascinated with having straight hair, that's all. He looks on at a good looking older boy in the neighbourhood and while Junior's mother and grandmother thinks it's because Junior is attracted to the boy, I believe Junior just wants to look and be like the boy. I can understand that the mother is frustrated as she leads a very hard life, one which single parents know all too well. But Marta goes about this whole parenting thing the wrong way, when she thinks she's helping Junior, she's actually doing more harm than good...and trust me she does a lot of harm to that child, not physically but mentally and emotionally.
As part of a collab with Olivia Andrews, and wanting to know first hand what single parents out there thought about this film and the issues that it raised, I conducted an interview with a single mother who saw this particular film.
Here is the interview :
Questions asked:
1. How long have you been a single parent?
2. How many kids do you have?
3. Do you work? If yes, part time or full time?
4. Do you get help from anyone to take care of you child/children?
5. Which film from the trinidad+tobago film festival that pertains to single parenting did you see?
6. What were your views on the film?
7. What in the film stood out to you as a single parent?
8. What did you like about the film the most?
9. What did you dislike about the film the most?
10. Does the film relate to your own life as a single parent in any way? If so, how?
11. After looking at the film, together with your own experience as a single parent, what advice would you offer to other single parents out there?
Answers received :
1. 5 years
2. 2 kids
3. Yes I do, full time.
4. Yes my mother.
5. Pelo Malo
6. It was a really good film, glad that I got to see it, it raised a lot of issues on parenting and what children from broken homes go through.
7. What stood out to me the most in this film would have to be the way the mother in the film treated her son. As children normally do, they like to play with their mom’s hair and stuff like that, my son does it, in the movie, when the child tried to be close to his mother in any way, she would just push the child away, as if his touch burnt her or something. It was disgusting the way she treated that poor boy, all he wanted was her love and acceptance, but she deprived him of such, which led to him acting the way he did.
8. I loved how the film showed the mother’s struggle to find work and the things that she had to do to get a job, it’s a very real situation that women face on a daily basis, struggling to get a job to make ends meet.
9. Actually I didn't dislike anything, loved the entire film, very well done.
10. Yes it relates to my life in multiple way, firstly with the struggle for single moms to find and keep jobs while trying to raise their kids at the same time. Also it’s very difficult to see about two children and work full-time, I don't want to work full time because I wish I had more time with the kids but it’s not an option for me. I have to do what I’ve got to do because I have two growing kids to raise, so I often depend on my mother to help me take care of them. Sometimes I think, without her help, I really don’t know how I would cope. Single parenting is really not an easy task.
11. The advice that I would offer to single parents is that all children need is love, don’t substitute love with anything else, nothing will ever do the job as love would. I know it’s hard to find time in such a busy schedule but you have to make time for the kids, show them that you're there, even if they may not see you for most of the day, make some time, somewhere in the day to show them that you are there for them, there to listen about how their day was, what they liked, what they disliked, things like that. It’s really important that you do as it affects the child more than you could possibly imagine.
See below for the trailer for the film Pelo Malo :
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