You think you will never

be like your parents, but then one day you stand there and see your own mother or father in the mirror.

Alauda Ruiz de Azúa's debut film is as much about finding her daughter role as her mother role.

It's a beautiful grip.

Especially if you see the film in relation to the many problematizing depictions of motherhood that have recently appeared in both literary and dramatized form.

Books that are stories (many autobiographical) about mothers who doubt, even regret, their motherhood.

Movies like "The Lost Daughter" (2021), also based on a book, also belong to the trend of remorseful, lost and more or less bad mothers.

"A song for my daughter" does not belong there.

For newly delivered Amaia

(Laia Costa), life is as upheaval as it is confusing.

She is weepy with exhaustion, she is giddy with joy.

But the shameful doubts quickly appear - what to do?

How do you cope?

When her boyfriend Javi gets a job offer and goes away for a couple of weeks, Amaia and baby Jone move in with Amaia's parents for relief.

It will be a dizzying stay.

Amaia is used to being a daughter, used to the dynamics of the parents where the mother Begoña is the one who directs and dictates and the father mostly does what he is told.

But now Amaia is also mother to Jone – she needs her parents' help at the same time as she needs to be independent.

She doesn't want to be like her mother, not do like her, but at the same time, the mother knows how to take care of a child and Amaia has to learn from her.

When Begoña suddenly falls ill, Amaia's role becomes even more complicated.

As a daughter, she has to take care of her otherwise strong mother.

As a mother, she has responsibility for little Jone, who requires her full attention.

She sees that motherhood is inherited, that we may have a part of it in us, but that it is from others that we learn what we should also teach our own daughters.

The film is complex

in its simplicity, a humble portrayal of what it means to be a mother not only on an individual level but on a universal one, what it means to "do the best you can" and to accept that the perfect mother does not exist.

Or she exists precisely in the imperfect.