Child's Pose

When her adult son causes the death of a child in a car accident, an affluent Bucharest mother mobilises money, contacts and pressure to shield him from prosecution. Her campaign to save him lays bare how thoroughly she has organised and managed his life, and how much he resents it.

The film is a close study of enmeshment, maternal control and the guilt that binds a parent and an adult child who cannot separate. It offers a clinician a portrait of how care can become possession, and how a family's fixed positions survive even a death. It won the Golden Bear at Berlin in 2013.