Is he refusing to grow up, or can she not bear to let him go? Afraid that her son will leave her, a mother decides to push him back into the womb. Although he grows older, he can neither live without her nor become his own person. Nobody gets to really grow up, and the scissors of their imagined scenarios never manage to sever the umbilical cord.

Justīne Silakaktiņa, also known by her pseudonym Ķīna Tabaka, continues to explore the inner reality of the human being, where the façade conceals the distorted, the surreal and the uncomfortably intimate. Among the author’s previous works, the best-known is the absurdist tragedy Sick Dog’s Nightmares (2023). Silakaktiņa’s work has also attracted attention outside cinema – in her essay titled Dadaist Manifesto, in an aptly provocative Dadaist tone, she rejects the comforts of logic. Meanwhile, in this latest short film, shot on 16mm and imbued with a neo-Gothic sensibility, the symbiotic bond between mother and son, played by Daiga Kažociņa and Matīss Kučinskis, takes the form of both unconditional love and a pathological symbiosis marked by codependency.