For Women’s History Month in 2022, I assembled an extensive collection of films offering narratives about the experience of pregnancy, divided into the categories of abortion, giving the baby away, and raising a child. It was an eye-opening project for me, despite its practical coverage limitations. Afterward, I swore to continue seeking out contemporary movies that diversified the representation of motherhood on screen.
As a reflection on this project three years later, I figured I would highlight a few recent movies that I believe advance the canon, and why I think these movies are significant. Content warning: two of these films handle darker topics such as infanticide.
Broker (2022)
Broker is a movie about sourcing parents when you think you’re unable to take care of a child on your own. In this way, it is similar to the plight of Juno (2007) and Ninjababy (2022), but this film sends its mother on the road. After sex worker So-young (Lee Ji-eun) abandons her baby at a church, full-time laundromat technicians and part-time black market baby brokers Sang-hyeon and Dong-soo discover the boy and plan to sell him. However, So-young soon returns with a change of heart. Instead of stating her intentions, she accompanies the brokers on their quest in order to find out who her baby’s new parents will be. Further complicating the plot are the two police officers who are trailing the baby brokers and So-young, who has committed a crime of her own.
Broker is Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first Korean language movie. Despite the high stakes of the plot, it's actually rather heart-warming. Kore-eda is known for films about family dynamics. In 2018, he won the Palme d’Or for his film Shoplifters, which is about an adoptive “found family” in Tokyo. His 2022 movie attempts to take on similar themes – in a way, Sang-hyeon, Dong-soo, So-Young, a little orphan named Hae-jin form a found family – but this one has the narrative cushion of road trip bonding.
So-young’s son, Woo-sung, has already been born, so the film has no novel contributions about a changing body or decision to give birth, but its undercurrent of motherhood is meaningful because Kore-eda considers systems of care. Technically, the brokers actions amount to human trafficking, even though So-Young is present during the hand-off. Official vs. unofficial systems of placement and care are probed. There is also the ever-present dimension of So-young’s trauma, which is related to the baby's father – a married man whom she killed. His wife wants the baby back, despite it being So-Young’s (a mistress) child. In the end, So-Young turns herself in to the police, with the promise of raising Woo-Sung once she serves her time. One of the detectives ends up taking care of the baby in the meantime.
The movie is complicated, and honestly, one of Kore-eda’s weakest, but the involvement of So-Young – who is actively on the run – with the baby brokers makes sense. If one’s livelihood is already amongst the murky underbelly of urban life, keeping within those avenues might feel safer than deferring to formal authority. The detectives are too far along with the case for her to evade arrest, but they do end up seeing her humanity and permit her to turn her life around. Three years in jail is no walk in the park, but it might just grant her the distance from her old life that she needs to start fresh. Given her subsequent doubts about having given up her baby, it seems as though she was mentally prepared to be a mother, just not materially or circumstantially aligned with the environment required to give her child a good life.
The Girl with the Needle (2024)
If this storyline seems to wrap up too nicely, I will throw out an additional mention to 2024’s Best International Feature nominee The Girl with the Needle, which handles similar themes in a true-to-life story about post-war Denmark. In that film, the protagonist gives up her child to a female broker, only to end up working for her and henceforth discover that the woman is actually just killing the babies. Another time, another place, but certainly a very heavy exploration of the fate of unwanted children.
Stream on: Hulu
Saint Omer (2022)
Another film that does not explicitly represent pregnancy, Saint Omer is about the trial of a woman who killed her baby. But its subject matter is so rich, and given how little systematic racism has been explored in mainstream film about mothers, it is more than worth discussing.
Inspired by the 2016 Fabienne Kabou case, Saint Omer stars Guslagie Malanda as Laurence Coly, a young Black woman on trial in France for drowning her child. She is observed in the otherwise very white courtroom by Rama, a young writer who is herself four months pregnant. Most of the film is composed of Coly’s unbroken testimony and the judiciary’s line of questioning. Much of the interrogation targets her character, as a way to understand how she justifies her past decisions, such as studying European philosophy as opposed to African.
Why these details should matter to the review team is not really up for debate (we already saw the strangeness of the French legal system in full swing during 2023's Anatomy of a Fall), and director Alice Diop does not indicate that you need to make up your mind about the implications on her mental fitness. However, the constant “other-ing” by the prosecution is apparent, and Rama undoubtedly senses common ground in their Blackness.
Coly is a Senegalese immigrant whose separation from her roots is explored at length, and it is concurred that mental illness at least partially contributed to her decision to abandon her child. She sensed evil forces, and felt at odds with her white partner. The woman is inextricably stone-faced while weaving her story, and her lack of obvious panic or remorse on the witness stand alienates some of her interlocutors. Whether she tells truths or lies, assumptions cannot be reduced to her profile.
Coly’s emotion is not on the surface, but if one really listens, they can find her humanity. I found myself double checking whether her tears were real or imaginary, placed there by my expectations of remorse. It’s a woman-centric piece, through and through. A viewer’s engagement is likely to stem purely on the basis of their past experiences, as implied by the abstract flashbacks or cut-aways of the filmmaker’s stand-in, Rama. The trial is not about whether Coly is innocent or guilty, but how isolation drove her mad, and why she felt like relieving herself of this burden was the only solution to her various troubles. Diop goes one step further, connecting Coly's plight to the Greek myth of Medea, a sorceress who killed her children.
Saint Omer is a raw and cerebral movie, and as Rama clutches her just-emerging baby bump in the courthouse pews, you’ll understand why it fits into the motherhood series. Those who have raised children will be particularly sensitive to an infanticide case, but the movie challenges us to revise our initial judgments, and grasp so-called unthinkable action from an intersectional lens. She breastfed her baby shortly before leaving it. What does that detail mean to you?
Stream on: Hulu
Witches (2024)
Connecting beautifully with Saint Omer is Witches, the first documentary featured in this series, which may seem like a cop-out in a collection of cinematic portrayals of motherhood. However, beyond its picturesque and theatrical stagings, Witches is one of the most significant contributions to the genre in a long, long time.
Witches opens with a montage of archival scenes – primarily, filmic representations of the sorcerer nature: The Crucible, The Craft, The Love Witch, etc. The voiceover reiterates how these occult women were perceived by society, and the reasons for which they were burned at the stake or otherwise punished. Then, the voiceover transitions to a talking head of a woman relaying her experience of postpartum psychosis. The rest of the film discusses a long-taboo topic: harboring violent thoughts toward your child.
The intent of the documentary is not to normalize these urges, but to raise awareness of traumas that transcend “baby blues.” Protagonist and filmmaker Elizabeth Sankey discusses the rejection she experienced when opening up about her violent thoughts toward child and self. Why was everyone downplaying the intensity of her feelings? Where could she get the help she required? Sankey connects this back to the testimonies of women burned during the 15th century witch trial phenomena, which affected both Europe and its colonies. Many of these women expressed an inclination to hurt their children, and even accepted their punishment as a just outcome for these thoughts.
Fortunately, Sankey found a support group, and when it grew too serious, a clinical solution. The U.K. currently has a unique system of forced bonding between mother and child, with 24-hour observation enforcing that no tragic outcome may occur. Sankey, along with peers that have suffered through postpartum depression – including actress Sophia di Martino – openly explore their feelings of alienation after giving birth. It is a refreshing and, despite the subject matter, encouraging dissection of progress in psychological treatment and society’s evaluation of maternal struggle. I found myself gasping at some of the admissions of these now-stable women, and it occurred to me just how quickly someone may lose their grasp of reality. This witchy collection of confessionals is one of the bravest documentaries to hit the big screen in a while. Acknowledging the potential for darkness is the only way for some to find the light.
Stream on: Mubi
-Lydia
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