Baby Gravy

Planning a pregnancy can be overwhelming for any couple. When there's a third person involved, from outside the relationship, it only adds to the tension. Brona (Sophia Di Martino) desperately wants a baby. She's about to have a birthday and is terrified that she could have left it too late. But sitting in a pub beside the motorway, waiting for their sperm donor to arrive, she and her partner Alex (Jade Anouka) suddenly realise that all they've talked about is that wanting - and not how this will change them.

Alex, perhaps, didn't talk about it because she thought it fairly obvious - she's the practical type - but Brona worries about everything from the donor disapproving of them to their new family just not fitting in. She has a male ex, a source of insecurity for Alex, and never seems to have developed a queer sensibility, the confidence to live without needing to fit in. Over the pub table, the tensions between the two of them bubble up to the surface and spill over. It's time to panic, time to recognise all their points of incompatibility. Could it also be time to remember why they matter to each other?

Relying heavily on the performances of its two leads, Baby Gravy is a short but intense film which, by pulling Brona and Alex's relationship so tightly into focus, emphasis the emotional insignificance of the third party on whom they depend - regardless of what that third party may think about it. There's an innate absurdity in the idea of making so much fuss over a little canister of a fluid that is hardly in short supply. This absurdity in turn highlight the enormity and strangeness of pregnancy itself, something easily overlooked until the moment comes and everything is immediate and life-changing.

With the camera at the end of the table, director Marley Morrison moves back and forth between the two women's faces, as if we were seated beside them being ignored; at times Brona seems to forget that there's anyone else in the room. Later, both women move around the spaces of the pub as if looking for something. Will they find it, and remember how they came to this place/