Love Child: Eva Mulvad doc is an intimate and powerful, six-year Scenes From A Refugee Marriage

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B-plus

The phrase “huddled masses” from Emma Lazarus’s famous sonnet The New Colossus on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, has been in the news the last few years, quoted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and ex-FBI head James Comey among others, in response to the current U.S. administration’s anti-immigration policies. 

With all its good intentions, the poem tends to patronize refugees as a monolithic group, the “wretched refuse” that have washed up on the shore.

Syrian born refugee Mani surveys his new, theoretically-temporary Turkish home in Love Child.

Love Child, Danish director Eva Mulvad’s intimate family documentary, spans six years in the lives of one Iranian refugee family, and it’s a reminder that all refugee families are not alike, even if many aspects of their story typify the global crisis. 

The film starts dramatically in 2012, as a young couple, Sahand, and his partner, Leila, along with their toddler son, Mani, pack and leave Iran to hop a plane to Turkey. Shortly after they arrive, claiming refugee status at customs, Leila tearfully calls her mother back in Iran, fearful she will never see her again. 

Sahand and Leila were English teachers in Tehran. In short order, they find a suburban Istanbul high rise apartment to rent. Sahoud works a series of menial jobs, Mani enrols in a pre-school class and they begin to have a semblance of a normal family life, though there is nothing normal about their circumstances. 

 Gradually, through Leila’s extensive therapy sessions after their arrival in Turkey, we learn their backstory in a series of interviews with a woman (who is not clearly identified as a social worker or therapist). 

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We learn that the couple is not married, and Leila has a husband back in Iran.  She says he was a drug addict who regularly beat her. What’s more, after three years, their marriage was never consummated. She took up with Sahand, who, like her, was a literature teacher, and they began a secret affair. 

Their situation is dangerously complicated.  Mani is Sahand’s biological son but, legally speaking, the illegal lovers appear to be absconding with another man’s child.  As well, Saband says that, as a student, he was blackmailed into working with the secret police in Iran. Because of his dealings with the police, and their adultery, they will face imprisonment or death if they return. 

Their hope is to gain United Nations approval to allow them move to the United States, but the process is repeatedly delayed, partly because of the system is overwhelmed by the more than 3.5 million Syrian refugees who fled to Turkey from the civil war,  which has been continuous since March, 2011. 

Regularly, the couple check on the status of their case on the web site of the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) web page, to find, repeatedly, that no decision has yet been made. 

First they must prove they’re actually a family, and get a blood test that proves Mani is Sahand’s child. Can Sahand prove that the secret police know who he is? Not easily, under the UN rules for refugee status, since the subject was secret. And while Leila and Sahand may risk death, they do not fit the UN’s refugee requirements of persecution by race, religion, nationality or persecuted minority group. 

Mulvad’s great strength here is the reliance on a cinema verité fly-on-the-wall technique, watching the couple through moments of angry frustration, bitter quarrels, and moments of lightness and joy, all seamlessly edited by Adam Nielsen, in one looping narrative that could be called from Scenes from a Refugee Marriage. 

There are moments of hope: They both resume their careers as teachers, and Mani begins to thrive in his new life.  But when things are beginning to look hopeful, they hear the 2017 announcement of Donald Trump’s 2017 “Muslim ban” on seven countries, including Iran. Leila’s immediate reaction is one of incredulity: “But we’re not even religious!” 

With their secularism, education, and middle-class aspirations, and their romantic backstory Sahand and Leila are familiarly “like us,” if a few degrees closer to social collapse. There’s a brief scene, late in the film, when Sahand is obliged to join a line of poor immigrants, mostly Syrian women in headscarves, some rocking their babies, and one young woman, childless, with a thousand-yard stare, simply compulsively rocking. Psychological trauma shows in different ways, some more obvious than others.  

Love Child, directed by Eva Mulvad. Love Child is now available for theatrical streaming at https://theimpactseries.net