Crushed

An Indian-American film-maker's documentary project on rural development in India makes her face her own reality on motherhood and strained relationships, and brings her closer to her son.

One friend tells another friend what she remembers from reading the Somerset Maugham novel The Razors Edge 10 or 15 years ago. It is a sketchy and slanted remembering. They decide to shoot a film of this memory, a foggy tale with scant connection to the original but feeling the patronage of that text. Being artists and tricksters they do it as a game, all in one week, with donated short ends and gestural implications to narrative. What they really do is visit after years of not visiting. Endless talks about the state of the planet and our access to knowledge--power or ineptitude of art. All this talking and the film turns out with almost no dialog, sweeps silently through the story and the city of Baltimore which is often destitute, tropical and friendly.

The fate of strangers - a young girl, an everyday mother, a decorated Senator and her successful, adopted son - weave together as they are cast into the corrupt and deadly worlds of Child Protective Services and the Foster Care system that feeds into the rampant, unspoken nightmare of "legalized" child trafficking.