Foster Child

Thelma lives with her husband Dado and two sons Gerald and Yuri in a poor area of Manila where the local department of foster care entrusts families with abandoned children until they are formally adopted. The officials visit the foster mothers and make sure the children are being well taken care of. Thelma is one such mother, and her latest "son", named John John, has been part of her family for three years. But now the time has come when Thelma has to turn the boy over to his adoptive parents from America. We are taken through the last day that she spends with the child, who has become very attached to her. A seemingly ordinary story about a feeling that is increasingly rare in today's world, about the love of a woman for a child whose own mother has abandoned him. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)