Living below the poverty line in suburban Colorado Springs, Betty is a kid raising kids. A colourful collage of sights and sounds, holes and hollows, this portrait of motherhood as symbiotic experience is a sensory overload of symbols and non sequiturs. Documenting a tight-knit family of women—daughter Jade, mother Betty and grandmother Wilma—director Eva Marie Rødbro locates a language of love and dependency that entangles them, and a cycle of deprivation and deferred dreams that relates them. If films have family, this would count Harmony Korine and Larry Clark’s work as kissing cousins. Stylized music video, montage editing and birth video elements combine to depict the family’s hand-to-mouth existence with visceral understanding. Young motherhood is presented in purely visual terms—kids as big eyes and hungry mouths, mothers forever feeding and giving—in order to show how sacrifice and selflessness gets passed on and, too often, passed over on the big screen. Angie Driscoll
The Embassy of Denmark in Canada supports Danish films at Hot Docs
