Topside: Little and Her Mother's Aimless Flight

We are in the subway tunnels beneath New York, in the abandoned galleries that honeycomb the metropolitan system. A five-year-old girl known only as Little has lived there her whole life with her mother, surrounded by other homeless people who have carved out a home in this place hidden from the world and its sunlight. Little has never left. Her mother has convinced her that you can only reach the surface if you have wings; the girl waits for hers to grow, and meanwhile her entire known universe remains underground. Such an existence cannot last forever. Eviction arrives, and Little's mother decides to flee before child protective services can stop her—because she wants to keep caring for her daughter in complete and desperate independence.
What follows is a nocturnal odyssey touched with horror, because Little's world is pure horror: she has never seen a crowd, never grown accustomed to harsh artificial lights, having spent her childhood practically underground like a mole, in the semi-darkness that wraps the film's opening. Horror defines her mother's experience too—a woman whose love for her daughter risks collapsing into the selfishness of forcing her into a life without hope.
Part child's vision, part maternal gaze, part urban fable and part social drama, so much darkness and then so much light—Topside is a film that sheds its skin repeatedly, a debut worth remembering from Celine Held (who also stars) and Logan George, a young independent cinema duo to watch.