Documentary Educational Resources - Subject / Health & Medicine / Midwifery / All Films

Kau Faito'o

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 11:12:00 GMT

This is a documentary which not only shows the ancient traditional art form of healing, but also tries to capture the essence of being a traditional healer in an ever-changing environment. Traditional healers are shown collecting, preparing and administering herbal remedies that they have passed down from one generation to the next.

Healers discuss where, why and how they gained their knowledge and why they choose to carry on age-old customs and practices despite the fact that Tonga is becoming a nation increasingly dependent on western medicine. Tonga's traditional healers are adapting to niches such as prenatal care and physical therapy.

Interspersed throughout the film are beautiful scenes of water, agriculture, rainforest and people, all of which comprise current island life in the Kingdom of Tonga.

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Miss Margaret

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 14:49:00 GMT

Miss Margaret
Buy Now: $295.00

Once there were thousands of licensed Granny Midwives throughout the South. Now there are none. Who were they? Where did they go? Because of segregation, many Americans knew nothing about natural home birth with experienced Grannies like Margaret Charles Smith who learned from each other and could deal with breech deliveries, multiple births and other situations with no medical instruments or drugs. Miss Margaret tells of saving a one-and-a-half-pound baby by making an incubator out of a cardboard box and hot water bottles.

Miss Margaret successfully attended over 3,500 home births without a single maternal death, worked a farm like a man and triumphed over the advesities of Jim Crow, poverty, lack of education and the slavery of sharecropping. "I've been through the wringer," she says of living in Greene County, Alabama, a Ku Klux Klan stronghold where, according to Ralph Abernathy, "racism was so entrenched that winning the right to vote there was more historic than man's walk on the moon."

Film crews gathered footage and interviews from Miss Margaret and her neighbors in Eutaw, Alabama in 2001 and 2002. Music, archival photos, footage from the 1950's George Stoney film All My Babies, and Miss Margaret's narrative move us through 100 years of history in a unique community far from mainstream America. In Mrs. Smith's own words, themes of work, birth, death, and faith are explored.

Today, Eutlaw is still self-segregated, and 95% of US births happen in hospitals, 80% of babies are born on drugs, 33% are surgical births, and most obstetricians have never attended nor even seen a natural birth. Shy and modest in service to others all her life, Miss Margaret says, "I ain't scared to tell what I know. I'll die with what I know."

“This is another invaluable piece of history that must be added to your collection. It is a shame we can't learn more from these remarkable women that have come to be known as Granny Midwives. Savor every moment you can with Miss Margaret.”
— Simone Snyder, International Childbirth Education Association

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Sastun

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 07:45:00 GMT

Sastun
Buy Now: $295.00

Sastun tells the story of American herbalist Rosita Arvigo, whose quest to explore the healing powers of plants led her to the rain forest of Belize where she befriended one of the last remaining Maya shamans, Don Elijio Panti. While learning his secrets during her apprenticeship she unearthed her lifes work: to preserve Don Elijio's ancient healing knowledge and to bridge the gap between science and traditional healer's wisdom.

Funded by the National Cancer Institute in New York, Rosita Arvigo is in a race against time, scouring the tropical rain-forests of Central America in search of cures for many deadly diseases like AIDS and Cancer, before they are wiped out by deforestation.

About The Filmmaker

Born in the US and raised in Germany, Guido Verweyen started his film career as a cameraman for German Television, documenting events like the conflict in Yugoslavia. He was then awarded two scholarships from the German Government to study at the American Film Institute. Upon graduation, Guido worked as Director of Photography on many commercials, music videos, and features, including the Academy Award™ nominated documentary The Man On Lincoln's Nose. His commercial directing efforts earned him numerous awards and eventually led to his co-founding and creating content for Studio M, a new competitor to MTV.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Cine Golden Eagle Award, 2005

Audience Favorite Award & Honorable Mention – Best Film, Archaeology Channel Int'l Film & Video Festival, 2004

First Place – Forests Category, Earthvision Environmental Film Festival, Santa Cruz, CA, 2004

Best Documentary Award, Big Bear Lake International Film Festival, California, 2003

Best of Show, Platinum Aurora Award Winner, 2003

International Sasà Award, Environmental Film Festival, Italy, 2003

Telly Award, 2002

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We Know How To Do These Things

Fri, 24 Aug 2018 12:26:00 GMT

We Know How To Do These Things
Buy Now: $295.00

For these villagers, giving birth is a family affair; while a young girl is in labor, the birth attendant, mother and mother-in-law alternate between lending a hand and storytelling.

Barbara Johnson studied documentary film and photography with Jerry Liebling and Elaine Mayes at Hampshire College from 1970-1974. She began working for the Smithsonian's newly formed National Anthropological Film Center in 1975. She was sent to Nepal to document early childhood socialization and daily life in a large farming village in the Kathmandu Valley.

One of the Film Center's solo research filmmakers, she lived in this village for 15 months in 1978 and 1980. The 50 hours of sync-sound 16mm film which she shot in Nepal are part of the Smithsonian's Human Studies Film Archives. We Know How To Do These Things is made from the last hour of film she shot in Nepal.

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Woman To Woman

Fri, 24 Aug 2018 12:26:00 GMT

Woman To Woman
Buy Now: $295.00

Woman to Woman is a documentary that offers a portrayal of the mainstream medicalized American birthing model and the rise of the doula profession that seeks to counter what doulas believe to be the ill effects of the overuse of medical technology. The film takes a retrospective look at one couple's decision to give birth with doula assistance while offering insightful commentary from doulas themselves.

“Doula” is a Greek word meaning handmaiden, servant, or slave. Translated into the American birthing system, she is a woman who establishes professional contact with a woman usually in the last trimester of her pregnancy and is on-call for her birth. The doula accompanies the pregnant woman throughout her labor and delivery. She provides the continuity of care not offered in a mainstream hospital setting, assisting the laboring woman and her partner both physically and emotionally.

As an objective and educated participant, the doula is able to explain the stages of labor as they occur and offer alternatives to the routinized medical protocol. Statistics and oral testimony demonstrate that the presence of a doula decreases a woman's chances of having a cesarean section and increases her ability to give birth without medical intervention.

Woman to Woman weaves together footage from an 18-hour doula assisted labor and birth with interviews from doulas discussing the use of drugs during labor, pain management, and the role of male partners and family. The film also explores one doula's decision to birth at home with doula assistance. Through these stories, we hear the rationale behind doula assisted childbirth ranging from the wish to give birth free from drugs to the desire to surrender to the labor while feeling confident that one will be cared for.

Woman to Woman is a story about natural childbirth as well as about the empowerment of women and their partners. And it is also a story about activism. While doulas are working to make a difference in the lives of other women, they are also making political ground within the mainstream medical establishment.

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Bunong's Birth Practices

Thu, 26 Jul 2018 09:36:00 GMT

Bunong's Birth Practices
Buy Now: $320.00

On the basis of a social anthropological case study, this film documents the birth practices of the Bunong in Mondulkiri province, located in the northeast of Cambodia. Social, economic, and political changes are transforming the province tremendously and are affecting villagers' beliefs, perceptions and habits regarding pregnancy, delivery and early motherhood. Traditional midwives, pregnant women, mothers and their families give a personal insight into their present decision-making strategies, which are at the crossroads between tradition and modernity.

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At Highest Risk

Wed, 18 Jul 2018 13:31:00 GMT

At Highest Risk
Buy Now: $320.00

Just as the rivers of the Andes mountains twist and coil in a curious maze, so does the grave situation of Peruvian women's health care.

Within the past decade, the Andean women in Peru have faced a massive sterilization campaign, exorbitant fines for homebirths, remnants of a deadly civil war, and the second highest maternal death rate in South America. Yet, as they have for centuries, the Quechua and Aymara people are fighting to preserve their traditions, beliefs and integrity.

Through the compelling story of one Andean woman, Judyth Aguero Vega, we see the horrors and triumphs of Peru's volatile health care situation. Inside a small adobe kitchen, Elsa Romero-Murrado, a midwife in the rural town of Capacmarca, takes us through rarely seen birthing ceremonies. Down the dirt path, her neighbor Judyth, 27, shares her fears of birth as she bestrides the lines of modern and traditional medicine. Their town sits seven hours from the nearest hospital. Cerlia Mendoza, president of the Mother's Club, testifies to a list of 200 women who were bribed by doctors to undergo sterilization.

At Highest Risk winds through the beauty of Andean people's spirituality and their mysterious gift of self-preservation throughout centuries of adversity. As part of a Fulbright grant, our crew spent one year researching and filming in some of the most inaccessible regions of the Peruvian Andes. This is one of the most intimate looks at reproductive health care yet filmed in a developing country.

SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS

Society for Visual Anthropology/AAA Conference, Washington DC, 2007

INNERMISSION/LOVEORAMA TOUR, September 5 - October 31, 2006

National Women's Studies Association Conference, Illinois, 2007

Tulipanes Latino Art & Film Festival, Michigan, 2007

India International Women Film Festival, New Delhi, 2007

Salut per al desenvolupament/Health for Development Film Festival, Barcelona, Spain, 2009

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All My Babies: A Midwife's Own Story

Wed, 18 Jul 2018 13:30:00 GMT

All My Babies: A Midwife's Own Story
Buy Now: $320.00

When George C. Stoney was a boy delivering newspapers, he was curious about the black women with black satchels he would spot occasionally on the streets of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, before dawn. Later he learned these early risers were midwives.

This is a training film about midwifery which transcends the form. It was selected by the Library of Congress for placement on the National Film Registry in 2002 as "a culturally, historically and artistically significant work."

All My Babies was written, produced and directed by Stoney in collaboration with the featured midwife, Mrs. Mary Francis Hill Coley, as well as with local public health doctors and nurses. Recorded on location in Albany, Georgia, it shows the preparation for and home delivery of healthy babies in both relatively good and bad rural conditions among African American families at that time. The film is not only a profound portrait of Miss Mary as she was affectionately and respectfully known, but also is a documentary record of the actual living conditions of her patients.

Always interested in the effects a film has on the filmed and filmers, Stoney is amused to report everyone on the crew had babies after making this one. In addition, teamed with David Bagnall, Stoney returned to Georgia in 2007 to record a "reunion" in which over 150 people who had been helped into the world by Mrs. Coley participated. That reunion is now a new film-in-progress.

As a bonus, this DVD includes Palmour Street (1949), a dramatized, open-ended discussion of family relations, which Stoney co-directed on location in Gainesville, Georgia, for the Georgia Department of Public Health. Palmour Street is in Gainesville, Georgia. The people who live on it worked hard to make this picture so that they and all of us might know more about ourselves and our children. An early example of films for lay education sponsored by the Mental Health Division of the U.S. Public Health Service, it soon found an audience beyond the African American community for which it was designed.

“All My Babies is an asset as an educational tool and as a historical portrait.”
— Simone Snyder, International Childbirth Education Association

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