News

A scathing portrait of the selfishness and naiveté of teenage pregnancy in modern Poland, Katarzyna Roslaniec's Baby Blues is centered around an overtly image-conscious, 17-year-old girl named Natalia (Magdelena Berus). It is not motherly inclination or guilt that drives Natalia to keep her infant, she just seems to be attracted to the concept of toting around a little tyke. Perhaps it is Natalia's half-hearted attempt to keep Kuba (Nikodem Rozbicki), the baby daddy, around; but the perpetual stoner is way too distracted by skateboarding and video games to care about fatherhood. Teenage pregnancy may also be a genetic or learned behavior, since Natalia's mother is so close in age to Natalia that they could be siblings. That is probably why Natalia's mother prefers to leave Poland rather than stick around to help Natalia raise an infant.

Baby Blues

Directed by Kasia Roslaniec

Poland, 2013

Polish filmmaker Kasia Roslaniec returns to the East End Film Festival with another cynical tale of a youth spoiled by capitalist consumerism, following her turn at the event with 2010’s similarly themed Mall Girls. It’s probably disingenuous to make the blanket assumption that all Polish teenagers are this preoccupied with spending more money than they own, though Roslaniec confines events to a select group of five young people. Mostly restricting them to the inner-walls of a bereft city apartment, the film highlights a specifically troubling example of what can happen when a teenage girl dealt with parental responsibility has her support structures displaced by corruptible influences.

Her camera travels around the apartment in pursuit of its meandering adolescents with a Dardennesian pace; furthermore, the story of young Natalia (Magdalena Berus) abandoned with her newborn baby is a moral matter also well-suited to...