April's Daughter

Picture this: A young girl is expecting a child. She has no job and no education, nor does the father-to-be. They need all the support they can get; still the girl refuses to tell her mother about the pregnancy. It may seem strange, but 17 year-old Valeria has her reasons to keep quiet, and when her mother April actually shows up to help her out, we begin to understand why. April is her daughter's polar opposite: wealthy, beautiful, self-assured and efficient, and having herself been a young mother, she has plenty of experience.

April immediately takes complete control over the situation, and becomes the prime caretaker of her granddaughter once she is born. But is helping her daughter April's real and only motivation?

April's Daughter is a thriller that keeps us on the edge of our seats until the very end. It is also a disturbing film, with characters acting ruthlessly and highly irresponsibly throughout. Still, director Michel Franco resists any temptation to be melodramatic, quite the contrary. There is a restrained, almost neutral quality to his filmmaking that forces us to observe and think for ourselves whether the characters aren't in fact behaving quite rationally. That the film is set in Mexico, where broken families and absent fathers are all too widespread phenomena, is one key to understand what is going on. Cato Fossum

Michel Franco (b. 1979) is a Mexican director and producer. Since winning the Camera D'or for his first feature Daniel & Ana he has been a regular at the Cannes Film Festival. Norwegian audiences will know him best for After Lucia, which screened in Norwegian cinemas in 2012.