A portrait of a family trying to stay together despite the danger their love has created, and poor (political) timing working against them. With all of the hardships they've faced and sacrifices they've made, the story should feel more urgent but it somehow doesn't allow the audience to feel any of the tension that is clearly evident.

It's easy to root for this family, but the film is still lacking an emotional center and doesn't succeed in creating a "hook" to pull its audience in. We're not given enough to feel we're on the journey with them - instead, we're left outside and as mere observers, the stakes don't feel as high as they obviously are for the family we're following.

As a highly sensitive person, it's always notable when I don't feel anything about a film that deals with an emotional subject, and that is strangely the case here.

Lovely doc about a family seeking refugee status in Turkey; they struggle against their status but their love for one another keeps them together. We watch as they fight, conspire, and come closer together as a family.

Kinda incredible in how it portrays just their normal life, right on the edge of a cliff. And yet time marches on, and even though they have not escaped they have built a life for themselves.

TIFF19 #44

Love Child is long, and feels it, but that’s okay: what its subjects endure is insane, and insanely long, and the audience might as well feel the situation, not just be told of it in a 2-minute segment at 11 PM. The news might make you sympathetic to the plight of the oppressed, but a film like this gives you the chance to nearly live it and be empathetic. The world is stacked against people who don’t follow typical paths trying to achieve happiness, and this is sorry proof of it.

5yo Mani throwing a tantrum makes me cry 😢

We're so quick to pigeonhole people into ready-made categories for mass consumption and vilification that a personal account of their struggle like this proves invaluable.

my full review at The Film Stage and archived

Our cultural images of refugees have become standardised over the last few years. The defining image is that of groups or what some would uncharitably call hordes – the boat full of those escaping or refugee camps full of the desperate. These images serve to sum up the global crisis, but tend to depersonalise.

Love Child cuts through all that by focusing on one family of refugees, who head to Turkey after their adulterous affair conceives a child. The result is a powerful look at the bureaucracy that decides who is worthy of safety and who is not, and how society's morality can change and destroy lives and loves.

You will have questions, not the least among them how Mulvad wound up filming Sahand and Leila as they lay in bed, and how comfortable Sahand and Leila felt arguing, aware as they must have been that they had a filmmaker on their balcony, picking up every wounding insult. The simple fact is we do get close to them - close enough that after just two hours in their company, you may not want to leave them behind... This is a quieter, calmer film than "For Sama", which put us in the very thick of it, but the emotional turbulence visible beneath its surface is compelling, and its bombardments - which are those of fate - are every bit as keenly felt.

Documents the highs and lows of a couple trying to start a new life in a ‘safe’ country.

www.backseatmafia.com/film-review-love-child/

Incredibly intimate documentary, following 5 years in the life of an unmarried Iranian couple who flee from Tehran with their child. Roger Ebert talked about cinema as 'a machine for creating empathy' and this film is a perfect example of what he meant.

Beautiful, uplifting love story. You can feel every moment of the trials this family went through to stay together.

London Film Festival 2020.

An emotionally and politically tumultuous documentary, with has unflinching access to an atypical family escaping possible execution and seeking refuge through an infuriatingly lengthy and arduous process.

'Something forbidden we made legal'
- Leila

A portrait of a family trying to stay together despite the danger their love has created, and poor (political) timing working against them. With all of the hardships they've faced and sacrifices they've made, the story should feel more urgent but it somehow doesn't allow the audience to feel any of the tension that is clearly evident.

It's easy to root for this family, but the film is still lacking an emotional center and doesn't succeed in creating a "hook" to pull its audience in. We're not given enough to feel we're on the journey with them - instead, we're left outside and as mere observers, the stakes don't feel as high as they obviously are for the family we're following.

As a highly sensitive person, it's always notable when I don't feel anything about a film that deals with an emotional subject, and that is strangely the case here.

A story of one drop in an ocean among millions of others

a portrait of the infuriating and absurd legal asylum-seeking process. quite honestly fucked. great access.

Quite a strong human interest with a powerful educational value: an insight in the bureaucratic chaos of the UN, with migration being a Herculean task even for these well-educated protagonists.

Works well thanks to long a production time—I believe six years, with the kid growing up throughout the documentary.

Seen in the presence of director Eva Mulvad and a decent Q&A host for a change.

Met Isidor, Jeremias en Pascale.