From the director of powerful and nuanced short film Expensive Shit, comes Adura Onashile’s first feature film, Girl. An emotional portrait of a young girl and her mother, living in a Glasgow high-rise.

Firstly, beautiful. Stunning cinematography, you know when a shot can only be described as delicious?

Secondly, powerful performances. This isn’t a film driven by events, but one that asks you to sit in the characters’ emotional state. It has a more meditative pacing and tone. The journey of the film isn’t one you can chart from plot point to plot point, but one that invites you into the interiority of the characters, where so much is expressed even without dialogue.

Grace is Ama’s mother. She’s a young woman, only 25, and raising Ama alone. Fiercely protective of her 11-year old daughter, Grace has come to the attention of social work as she has been keeping Ama out if school. The trauma that caused her to fall pregnant at 14, that has left its mark on her in panic attacks and periods of dissociation, is never explicitly stated, but is conveyed through its impact on her relationship with her daughter.

They have a tight-knit bond, deeply loving, but blighted by the burden of Grace’s trauma being handed onto her daughter. Grace is trying to be invisible, doesn’t trust anyone, and it’s this that causes her to isolate herself as well as Ama. Ama is confined to their flat much of the time, and her tentative friendship with another girl at school is seen as a potential vector for the ingress of danger into their lives. Without intention, Grace’s protection of Ama veers into controlling and abusive.

What marks this film is the profound empathy it has for its characters. Despite highlighting the damaging impact of generational trauma, no judgement is placed on Grace. She is a very young woman who has survived god knows what, and is coping as best she can. And it’s not as if her fears are unfounded. Everything she’s worried about could happen. She plucks Ama’s underarm hair and refuses to let her wear deodorant, and while it seems extreme, you understand what she is doing, don’t let them smell it on you, don’t let them believe you are now fair game. It’s infantilising but the threat she’s trying to protect Ama from is one she herself has experienced first hand.

What’s great about Girl is there is no need to underline things. Without having to state anything explicitly, you can see the dangers of being a young, Black girl on the cusp of puberty, from an immigrant background and living in a high poverty neighbourhood. Girl doesn’t try to explain gender, class and race to you, like you’ve never heard of it before. It allows the characters to just be, without needing to explain themselves to the audience as an observer.

I also loved that Girl explores generational trauma without having to make anyone the villain. The damage this is doing to Ama is mirrored in the damage it has done and is still doing to Grace. Grace is equally the Girl of the film’s title as much as Ama. And because there is such genuine love between the mother and daughter, there is hope this can be overcome. That it is possible to heal.

Just a thoroughly moving film, deftly using the visual language of filmmaking and superb performances to take us on a journey of the invisible, the unspoken.