There is an extremely morbid joke and it goes like this. A teenager comes back home from school and smells something odd. “Mom, what’s that smelling like a rotting corpse? Mom? Mom?! Mom!!!”

The opening scene of Shea Formanes‘ debut feature “I Watched Her Grow” is somewhat akin to that joke, as the teenage protagonist Ada (Michelle Colman Padron) comes back from the school wanting to start the conversation with her mother Mirren (Eloisa Cardona) only to receive no answer before finding her dead. The thing is, Mirren was not a regular human, but an entity crossed between a plant and a human, so her existence was known only to her daughter who centred her life around caring for her, and to their only friend, the local shopkeeper Inez (Aarti Tiwari).

I Watched Her Grow review is part of the Submit Your Film Initiative

Seven years later, Ada still...