Babyteeth

Dear Mark

Babyteeth captures the uniquely singular situation of simultaneous coming of age, and death. The film follows the last few days of teenager Milla's cancer battle, pitching the whirlwind emotions of youth against the brutal contrast of untimely death. She falls in love hard and completely with Moses, a drug-using unemployed youth who's wild spirit is pure magnetism for Milla, who is experiencing the acute exit velocity available only to those who know that the end is nigh. Her doting parents resist this pairing at first, but then, heartbreakingly accept that Moses is the final experience that their daughter desires, and reluctantly, but kindly, welcome him into their home to fulfil Milla's wish.

Babyteeth breathtakinlgy shows a beautiful spirit that is at the intersection between falling and flying. Dancing and music eventually give way to those strange bedfellows: sex and death in the perfect microcosm of a short life that is heightened and frenzied by an accelerated end. What we are left with is her parents' excruciating, inconsolable grief, a grief only tangible because of the gorgeousness of Milla's life.