Still: Mother's Child - Naomi Noir

In Naomi Noir’s short animation Mother's Child, selected for Berlinale Shorts, Mary is the 24/7 carer of a grown-up son whose needs are as fundamental as it gets. She lives in a house that she doesn't have the time to clean, with a Rottweiler that eats from the oversized, shit-filled adult nappies that are discarded. And she must deal with an impenetrable, Kafkaesque social care system which refuses to listen to her entreaties, let alone offer any tangible support.

Mary loves her son very much but, as is graphically shown in Noir’s short animation, she is literally drowning in stress and angst, and at times of greatest need her eyelashes extend to cling onto her boy.

What’s more the whole thing is set in London, where the pub she goes to with her best friend (who communicates via a voice box) is a den of cocaine-fuelled vice, and where the sentiments expressed are as harsh as the accents that express them.

The project has a very personal undertow for the director, who grew up in the Dutch countryside with a brother who has severe mental and physical disabilities.

“I have always seen my mother struggle, ever since I was young, with loads of administration and the very insane and dreary phone calls she would always have, having to explain my brother's condition,” says Noir. “I always felt my mother felt very misunderstood in our daily lives while taking care of my brother. And at some point I felt I needed to show people this insight - but it's quite hard to explain something that is really only experienced within the privacy of the four walls of a home.”

Noir could have made a documentary, but docs are not her thing. Rather, animation was the obvious and perfect vehicle for a story that, as it develops, takes on fantastical and dreamlike qualities.

“I think that's the power of the form, that you can do absolutely anything you want in animation and there are no rules,” she says. “Every feeling that you have, you can express in line work.”

That said, when Noir was making the film in her own native Dutch language, it all seemed so close to home, and at times she even found herself veering back down the documentary route. So she entered into collaboration with her friend, Londoner Maya Devincenzi Dil, who voiced the character of Mary in all her frustration and anxiety.

 “I wrote the first fundamentals of the script and then Maya filled it in with her own experiences - and she Britified it,” says Noir.

 The resulting Mother’s Child is a bold and uncompromising work, rendered in stark lines and blasts of vivid colour, and akin to the animated works of noted British animators Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman.

“I like to make my stories surreal and fictional. For me that enables me to express core feelings, in this case Mary's feelings. And that's why I like to play with dream sequences when you can escape from reality but also get closer to how a character is actually feeling.”

Despite the work’s similarities to Scarfe and Steadman, Noir cites Estonian animator Priit Pärn and Kōji Yamamura as influences, as well as the drawings of the late David Lynch.

“I don't watch that many animations actually, because at some point when you animate as much as I do, you can't watch them anymore because your mind will just explode,” Noir confides. “But there are so many possibilities in David Lynch's drawings and they are very inspiring to me. They are obscure and quite dark. And in my opinion, some things in life are obscure and quite dark.”

Find out more about Berlinale here.