Nick Schager Film CriticThere’s a real home birth depicted in “Alia’s Birth,” but most everything else about Egyptian American writer-director Sam Abbas’ film is excessively mannered and oblique. An indie that, lacking an actual narrative or characters, asks viewers to parse meaning from subtle formal and storytelling clues, this off-the-beaten-path effort — nominally about a lesbian couple whose relationship becomes strained over the course of a night — frustrates more than it intrigues, and won’t have much appeal outside the furthest corners of the art-house world when it debuts in theaters and on VOD on Aug.
