Kiddo

Eleven-year-old Lu is living in a foster home when her long-lost mother Karina shows up unexpectedly and takes her on a wild road trip in a beat-up sports car – all the way to her grandma in Poland. Lu soon finds out it’s all or nothing with Karina when she gets pulled into a Bonnie-and-Clyde-like fantasy. But reality quickly catches up, forcing them to decide what they’re willing to do to stay together forever. What is it like, after years of waiting, to meet a mother again who is almost more of a child than you are? Who is seductively cool and funny, then unpredictable and even irresponsible the next moment? It is rare to find children's films that tell this story as courageously and captivatingly as ‘Kiddo’. ‘Kiddo’ is adventurous, wild, often brusque and leaves a lot open. Karina storms into her daughter's life like a whirlwind, and you almost fear that Lu will be swept away. But Lu is not a victim and learns what she wants on her journey: security, safety, love and respect. The fact that she stands up for this and becomes increasingly self-confident is her strength - and also the strength of the film. ‘Kiddo’ is a flawless road movie about the past, the future and the place where you belong. ‘And yet, as much magic as the story allows itself, ‘Kiddo’ is not about emotional abuse, but about a nuclear family that has to find itself and can only do so because there would probably never have been room for these truths in the institutionalised framework of the encounter, which in the end actually allow for reconciliation and selflessness. Dwinger and her co-author Nena van Driel immerse this story in a pop-culturally informed but never artificial mix of Dutch and English, with a little Polish thrown in at the end. It contains layers of meaning and experience of migration and exclusion, of a life on the margins of society. Douwe Hennink's images emphasise this; almost all the landscapes appear vast and lonely, with no trace of big cities and the upper middle classes. Instead, there is a longing for a home, possibly a common one, in which this dissimilar couple, who look so similar, do have a place: ‘Home sweet home, here we come’.’ (Rochus Wolf, on: kino-zeit.de)