Cypriot filmmaker Tonia Mishiali tackles immigration, the patriarchy and the strength of women in “The Lion at My Back,” which is playing in the Crystal Globe competition at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival.
The feature follows the bond that grows between Senegalese immigrant Mariama (Sokhna Diallo) and Stella (Elena Kallinikou), a woman who works at a Cyprus immigration center who is trying to rebuild her life.
“Each has their own issues, their struggles,” the director says of her second feature. She wanted to build on what she had created in “Pause,” her first feature. “So I thought, OK, two parallel story lines. I follow one, then when they meet, I transcend to the other one, and then every time they meet, I started to build their relationship more and more and more to come more organic in a way.”
Mariama, despite facing limited job prospects and racism, is happy, almost joyous about life, while Stella is bitter and cynical but clings to hope — and Mishiali subtly doles out the backstories of the characters, building fully rounded women that a patriarchal society has used and abused them (but she doesn’t deal in polemics — she skillfully creates well-round portraits of male characters, too). But Mishiali refuses to have them give up, which tracks: she centers her films on social justice and women’s issues.
