From Omeleto.
A woman becomes a professional parent.
THE PROFESSIONAL PARENT is used with permission from Erik Jasan. Learn more at https://linktr.ee/professionalparent.
Ingrid is a single parent living in an eastern Slovak village with her ailing daughter and her resentful mother. Living in poverty with few job prospects, she works at a grocery store and also as a sex worker at night, doing anything to help her family survive.
She is also waiting to become a professional parent, an employee of one of Slovakia’s Centres for Children and Families who provides home-based caregiving outside the local children’s home. The monthly salary as a professional parent would help ease her struggles. But when Ingrid becomes the professional parent to a Roma girl, the act of necessity exposes the deeper fault lines of the system.
Directed and written by Erik Jasan, this profoundly powerful Oscar-longlisted short drama is an unflinching portrait of the intersection of morality, poverty and caregiving within a broken system. Inspired by the experiences of the director’s sister, who was a professional parent — as well as a murder in 2015 of a one-year-old Roma girl by her professional father in Slovakia — it achieves the emotional and moral density of a feature film, offering a disquieting examination of a social structure with its disciplined storytelling, refusal of melodrama and almost forensic dissection of one woman’s financial desperation.
The storytelling is remarkable for its stripped-down economy, using just twelve shots in its 14-minute runtime. It would be tempting to call the style documentary-like, but there is undeniable artistry in its drab, muted colors and its eye for telling detail, whether it’s a seemingly throwaway expression of disgust directed at the Roma, a tentative gesture or the hard-scrabble neglect of the domestic spaces. The direction’s restraint gives the film an observational realism, and the visuals make it an experience both intimate and chilly in feeling.
At first, Ingrid appears sympathetic, as a single mother trying to provide for her child. Her interactions with her daughter are devoted and even tender. The narrative also slowly fills in Ingrid’s economic reality, helping us to understand how becoming a professional parent will change her life. The poverty is crushing, and with Ingrid’s daughter sick and in need of medicine, we understand the stakes.
But when Ingrid becomes a professional parent to a Roma girl, her treatment of the young girl is harsh, punitive and cruel, as the deeply embedded antipathy and bigotry against the Romani surfaces in her. It’s painful to watch, because Ingrid’s treatment of her professional child is in stark contrast to how lovingly she treats her daughter, and it’s a testament to actor Ela Lehotska’s layered performance that both the caring mother and cruel professional parent resonate with raw honesty. But after one particularly vehement altercation, even Ingrid becomes shocked at how cruel she can be, horrified by her own moral compromises.
Haunting, distressing and ultimately an urgent watch, THE PROFESSIONAL PARENT is not just a troubling portrait of the professional care system as it intersects with latent prejudices and racism, but also about poverty so pervasive and entrenched that morality becomes a luxury. Though it refuses to be didactic, it doesn’t look away from the complexity of its main character and the harsh world around her — one seemingly indifferent to the struggles of its most vulnerable. It’s a brutal reality, not just in Slovakia, but in many places in the world, where people survive not with kindness or generosity, but through calculation and strategy.
