FILM REVIEW: Girl @ Glasgow Film Festival

British-Nigerian writer-director and actor Adura Onashile’s Girl opens the Glasgow Film Festival 2023. It’s a poignant, slow-paced portrait of the claustrophobic relationship between a mother and daughter who are immigrants to Glasgow but have not settled in yet.

Grace (Déborah Lukumuena) and her 11 year-old daughter Ama (Le’Shantey Bonsu) have that special bond of two people who are alone in the world except for each other. But the bond becomes tested as Ama forms a friendship at school with Fiona (Liana Turner).

Ama is isolated from other people and Grace wants to keep it that way, reminding her often not to look outside their own relationship for anything, but Ama is growing up and becoming curious about the world around her. She watches her neighbours with binoculars from her highrise balcony. Her mother, though, feels threatened by her daughter’s tiptoe steps towards independence and is obsessed with keeping her safe. It is Grace, however, who needs to feel safe, and it becomes apparent that something bad happened to her in the past which triggered this heightened anxiety, and made her so concerned about her daughter’s puberty.

There are fantastic performances all round. The mother’s sense of vulnerability is palpable, and her instinct to suffocate her daughter’s freedom understandable in its own way, but you can’t help root for Ama reaching towards a happier life in the innocent and bright friendship she is developing with cheerful Glaswegian Fiona.

This is Onashile’s debut feature and she worked on it for five years. It’s inspired by elements from her own childhood, and also becoming a mum. She made Glasgow home a decade ago and has done well here – last year giving an outstanding performance as Medea with the National Theatre Scotland, and being nominated for a BAFTA for her short film Expensive Shit.