– Cypriot director Tonia Mishiali’s second feature teams up two excellent actresses, Elena Kallinikou and Sokhna Diallo, in a story of unlikely female bonding
Elena Kallinikou e Sokhna Diallo in The Lion at My Back
After her feature debut, Pause, screened in Karlovy Vary‘s East of the West section in 2018, Cypriot filmmaker Tonia Mishiali returns to the Czech festival – this time in the Crystal Globe competition – with The Lion at My Back, the second instalment of her planned, women-centred trilogy. Warm and tender, the film follows two very different women as they forge an unlikely connection.
We meet Senegalese asylum seeker Mariama (Sokhna Diallo) as she celebrates her 18th birthday in a shelter for homeless youth. But this also means she will have to leave, and she has nowhere to go. Stella (Elena Kallinikou), a Cypriot woman in her early forties, works at a shelter while fighting for custody of her daughter, lost to her past struggles with drug addiction and prostitution.
When Mariama keeps sneaking back into the shelter, Stella reluctantly lets her spend the night at the flat she shares with a group of similarly ‘broken’ people – in exchange for a urine sample. Stella has been clean of hard drugs for more than two years, though she still takes cannabis drops and is regularly tested.
Mariama, meanwhile, is battling a bureaucratic nightmare of her own, but Stella knows a butcher willing to employ her without papers – where the young woman also finds a friend, and perhaps a love interest. Stella, for her part, is pouring all her money into therapy and is desperate to get a place of her own, so she returns to her former pimp and is forced to accept one last, demeaning job. This, in turn, puts Mariama in danger too.
The anxious, defeated but tenacious older woman becomes a kind of surrogate mother to the innocent, energetic and headstrong Senegalese girl, who in turn offers her emotional support and positivity. It is this relationship – and the magnetic interplay between Kallinikou and Diallo – that elevates an otherwise by-the-book screenplay by Mishiali, Dianne Jones and Simona Nobile, one that follows a well-trodden path: two very different characters bond, overcome obstacles together, and ultimately help each other grow.
Mishiali has evidently worked closely and extensively with her two actresses, and the relationship she builds between them is more complex than a straightforward mother-daughter dynamic. At times they seem like sisters; at others, more like aunt and niece. But at its core, the film is about the rich dynamics between two women – lending it a decidedly feminist slant in the most humanistic sense, rather than as any kind of activist statement.
That warmth and tenderness are further supported by cinematographer Manu Tilinski‘s work on 16mm. Often handheld, the camera follows the characters closely, shifting between their perspectives, but it’s at its strongest when the two of them share the screen. Rather than producing the documentary-like effect handheld tracking shots often create, it instead adds to the authenticity and a sense of genuine affection between its leads.
Given this context and concept, a scene addressing the refugee crisis head-on feels almost unnecessary – another box ticked in the script rather than an organic beat. With its settings shifting from an institution to a run-down flat, a butcher’s shop, a pimp’s den in a warehouse and a seedy underground sex club – with sun-scorched city streets and a white-sand beach in between – the film already comments organically on the social and economic landscape it depicts.
The Lion at My Back is a co-production between Cyprus’s Bark Like a Cat, Luxembourg’s Iris Productions and Greece’s Avaton Films.
