Here is a deeply felt social-realist movie performed with integrity and calm by west coast rapper and musician Tia Nomore making her acting debut. Writer-director Savanah Leaf is herself making her feature directing debut, having developed this project from a short film made with Taylor Russell. Leaf is a former music video director and, London-born, competed in the 2012 London Olympics as a volleyball player and so, remarkably, becomes the first Team GB graduate to make a film for the ultra-hip studio A24.
Nomore plays Gia, a young African American woman from the Bay Area who has two children in foster care; she is in recovery from drug abuse and is repeatedly late for supervised contact sessions with the children and for the various court-ordered courses she is required to undertake. This, as she keeps pointing out, is because of the jobs she has to hold down; part of her grim and humiliating task of proving that she is a decent mother and human being.
