– Czech director Hana Stehlíková’s short examines the impact of a baby’s arrival on a young couple, with the emphasis on the mother
You Are My Light is a ten-minute Czech animation that deals with the postpartum depression borne by a new mother. Written and directed by Hana Stehlíková, the Animateka-selected film deploys soft brushstrokes and bizarre exaggerations to vividly portray a mother’s typical situations after her child’s birth. There is an effective contrast between the pink, soft backgrounds and the sometimes fierce emotions experienced by the mother – occasionally visceral, even brutal.
To amplify the maternal duties of everyday care, Stehlíková emphasises the protagonist’s long black hair that continuously entangles her both physically and mentally. Her infant’s face is never seen, but we hear their screaming and crying as a disconcerting presence.
When the mother is pushing her baby in a pram, the more she tries to walk, the harder she finds it to move forward. Her hair becomes a wave-like obstacle that powerfully engulfs her, leaving her mind in disarray and irritation.
In the meantime, she has to wrestle with the miscellaneous in her life. Running back and forth in different buildings that symbolise her different roles, an inescapable sense of depression becomes breathlessly tangible.
In a scene where the mother breastfeeds her baby, the pram becomes the living image of a predator that consumes her bit by bit. Ultimately, the baby carriage transforms into a little monster with fangs that extorts the mother’s nutrition and energy, and later rumples her into a wrinkled, skinny figure.
Depicting this repetitive, seemingly endless duty, editor Lucie Haladová controls the rhythmic pace of the sequence. She speeds things up using alternating shots as things become more and more chaotic and the mother is overwhelmed. The film illustrates how much a woman can suffer under unprecedented pressure when pushed to her limit – and beyond.
By focusing on the daily activities carried out by a mother, while the father figure is present but passively unhelpful, You Are My Light asks us to care about and confront the issue of postpartum depression. More significantly, the film criticises the social structure that lays excessive responsibility on the agency of females, depriving them of their original lives as individuals. This further distorts their prospect of what a bright future could be.
