101 min | R | July 7, 2023 | A24
Gia is pregnant, broke, and fighting to win back the two kids the foster system already took. The state wants proof she can be a stable mother and gives her no way to become one. Savanah Leaf’s debut watches the machine grind without ever blinking.
Gia is a pregnant single mother in the Bay Area trying to regain custody of her two children from the foster system. She works at a portrait studio, attends mandated parenting classes, and counts the supervised visitation hours she gets with the kids she already has. The state holds the power and Gia spends her days proving she deserves to be a parent. The film is about the impossible arithmetic the system demands. It asks a poor Black woman to demonstrate stability while denying her the means to build any.
Tia Nomore plays Gia with a stillness that never tips into passivity. She holds her face in check during the parenting sessions and the visitation hours because showing too much feeling could be used against her. Erika Alexander plays Miss Carmen, the adoption counselor, with a warmth that carries an institutional edge. She is kind and she is also part of the machine. Doechii plays Trina, a friend further down the same road, and Sharon Duncan-Brewster plays Monica with the worn patience of someone who has worked these cases for years. The supporting cast fills the bureaucracy with people, not villains.
Savanah Leaf writes and directs her first feature with a documentary instinct for texture. The cinematography favors natural light and close framing that keeps Gia trapped in the foreground while the world blurs behind her. Leaf cuts away to dreamlike inserts of the redwood forest and to interview-style monologues from real women describing their own losses. These breaks rupture the realism and widen the story past one character. The sound design stays quiet and lets long silences do the work that dialogue usually does.
The film refuses the redemption arc the system pretends to offer. Gia is not being rehabilitated. She is being processed. Leaf understands that the cruelest part is not the people inside the system but the design of it. The film holds its compassion steady and never lets that compassion soften the verdict.