Needle Park Baby

Spring 1995. The open drug scene in Zurich has been cleared and the people who lived there are moved elsewhere. Mia, eleven years old, is sent to the countryside with her mother Sandrine, who is addicted to heroin. Mia tries to look after her; school, the housework and her mother's crises all fall on her. She makes a few friends in the town. Pierre Monnard's Swiss film is adapted from Michelle Halbheer's book about her own childhood. The telling neither romanticises addiction nor makes the mother a one-dimensional villain; the woman loves her daughter and still cannot care for her. The real subject is what the child carries. Luna Mwezi plays Mia and Sarah Spale the mother.