Don't Call Me Mama

A forbidden passion between a teacher and a young asylum seeker exposes power dynamics and moral ambivalence in Nina Knag’s feature-film debut.

Eva (Pia Tjelta, Blind Spot) is a popular high school teacher, married to the town’s mayor and a pillar of the local community. When she volunteers at a refugee center, she meets Amir, an 18-year-old asylum seeker (Tarek Zayat, Shorta), and soon falls deeply in love. What begins as a caring act of support develops into a passionate and forbidden relationship with catastrophic consequences. Through finely tuned interplay between its main characters, Don’t Call Me Mama delivers a charged psychological drama about the borderland between desire and vulnerability – and how selfishness can be disguised as goodness.

• Josef Kullengård