Following her 2015 global hit The Second Mother, Brazilian writer-director Anna Muylaert continues her exploration of the mysteries of the maternal with Don’t Call Me Son. As she did in her previous film, Muylaert contrasts two very different mothers. There is Arcay, the working-class single parent to teenage Pierre and his younger sister; and the affluent Gloria, who has searched many years for Felipe, her first-born son who was stolen from her shortly after his birth. In a head-spinning turn of events, Aracy is arrested as the long-ago baby snatcher, and Pierre is abruptly transferred by the law into Gloria’s care.  Muylaert casts the same actress, Daniela Nefussi, as both Arcay and Gloria , as a means of allowing us to, in a sense, identify with two distinct sides of the same woman, to think of the characters not as adversaries but, rather, as destinies dictated by circumstance. Meanwhile Pierre/Felipe struggles with identifying his “true” mother—is it the woman who nurtured and loved him all his life, or the one who gave birth to him? There is, of course, no simple answer. Family is a matter of blood and choice, as Muylaert so convincingly—and movingly—argues.  – Jaie Laplante