Novelist and filmmaker Nicole Conn was faced with a seemingly impossible choice when the surrogate mother carrying her child delivered what is known as a "micro preemie": Should she give in to the impossibly long odds against the survival of a baby born weighing only one pound 100 days early and allow it to expire early? Or should she devote a massive amount of energy, time, and resources to fighting for the baby's health and still face a terrifyingly uncertain future for both her baby and her family?
Conn's documentary little man documents the first few years in the struggle to keep Conn's baby as well as the havoc it wrought on her life, finances, and partner, who threatens to crack under the pressure of trying to keep an infant alive under such trying circumstances. It's an extraordinarily personal first-person doc that's a little too intimate at times. It's the kind of documentary that makes viewers feel a little like an unwitting psychiatrist exposed to emotions and problems with which they'd rather not deal. While Conn's story is inherently compelling, it's pretty much ruined in the telling thanks to her unnerving choice to fill it with a twinkling piano-heavy score, florid narration, and trembling slow-motion. Conn made her name with Claire Of The Moon, a 1992 lesbian romance noted at the time for a climactic soft-core sex scene. Here it's as if she wanted to transform her life into emotional porn.