Movies: Maternity

Claire is a midwife and has devoted her life to others. At a moment when she is preoccupied by the imminent closure of the maternity clinic where she works, her life is further turned upside down when Béatrice, her father's former mistress, turns up ...

Lola (40) enjoys a happy life until an unforeseen pregnancy throws her plans into disarray. Resistant to motherhood and confronted by societal expectations, Lola and her boyfriend, Bruno, deal with the situation. As Lola confronts her inner fears abo...

Maria is a shellfisherwoman and midwife in a small village in the Illa de Arousa in 1970s Galicia. After an unexpected event, she is forced to flee to Portugal....

Jeanne take her daughter for the week-end in Majorque. While everything goes to rack and ruin, mother’s only concern is to photograph Kiki, the classroom mascot....

This student film by the award-winning Helena Třeštíková bears many of the hallmarks of her later work. Made as a graduation piece when she was at the FAMU Film and TV Academy in Prague, we see the director developing the distinctive observational st...

Helena, a woman in her early 40's, is obsessed with getting pregnant. After failing her last try, her neighbors get back from the hospital with their new born baby. Helena breaks in to their house when they´re gone, steals the baby monitor and starts...

She drove me into a corner, then forced me to go beyond my limits. She made me confront the absolute: love, sacrifice, tenderness, abandonment. She dislocated me, transformed me. Why didn't anyone warn me? Why doesn't anyone ever talk about this?" Un...

Emmett enters into a nightmarish game of therapy with his wife Anya, who has inexplicably taken on the persona of his estranged and recently-deceased mother....

By approaching the process of sexual reassignment, the work mixes data and experiences, focusing on family relationships and the nuances of the feminine....

Given the fetishizing and normalizing character that is given to motherhood in patriarchy in order to perpetuate the social order, do we truly choose to be mothers? Why is care, of fundamental vital labor, presupposed as an especially appropriate tas...

Natalia is a 17-year-old mom living with her mother and son, Antos. She wanted to have a baby because it was a “cool” thing to do, and because she feels she has someone to love; someone who can love her in return. Everything changes when Natalia’s mo...

In parallel stories, a social butterfly and a lower middle-class wife brace themselves for the challenge of birthing a child in the modern era....

The planet’s busiest maternity hospital is located in one of its poorest and most populous countries: the Philippines. There, poor women face devastating consequences as their country struggles with reproductive health policy and the politics of cons...

Two drag queens living in a place where homophobia and transphobia are common open their hearts to the world, revealing the human being behind the makeup and wigs. They share the reality of drag as an art form and what it means to move forward as par...

Saeko and Yukako live together in a small apartment complex in Tokyo. After the Tohoku earthquake in 2011, both live in a state of unease. Saeko, who is in a divorce, is worried that her daughter is exposed to radiation. Yukako is also afraid of radi...

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That Mothers Might Live is a 1938 American short drama film directed by Fred Zinnemann. The short is a brief account of Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis and his discovery of the need for cleanliness in 19th-century maternity wards, thereby signif...

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Being mother is the most natural thing in the world. Or so it seems. Yet the demands on women with children have rarely been as overloaded and contradictory as they are in today’s Western world. Promises of happiness are often followed by disadvantag...