Glowing stars (2009)

Glowing stars (dir. Lisa Siwe) tackles a challenging subject: grief. A teenager grapples with the feelings of growing up and in the middle of all this, she is confronted with the illness of her mother. Mother and daughter live with the grandmother, an easy target for the angry and sad teenager. The challenge of the film is what type of story it seeks to commit itself to. At times, the narrative lazily goes through the usual suspects of teen angst. Other scenes come across as having a real story to tell, beyond the stereotypes of the teen drama. The strength of the film is how it deals with the teenager's bursts of anger: it focuses on the way unconditional social relations are strained, yet not broken, by these very strong emotions.