Documentary Educational Resources - Subject / Gender / Reproductive Health / All Films

The Child the Stork Brought Home

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 08:16:00 GMT

The Child the Stork Brought Home
Buy Now: $320.00

The Child the Stork Brought Home is an intimate portrait of a gestational surrogacy arrangement, from the embryo transfer that "took" and got both the gestational surrogate and genetic parents "pregnant," to the birth of a slightly premature baby girl 34 weeks later.

The film captures, through spaced interviews and cinema verite scenes; doctor visits, the baby shower, the birth and its emotional aftermath. The ethical complexity of this most controversial of reproductive arrangements is revealed, at once celebrating its potential to transform understandings of the nuclear family and motherhood, while raising an alarm: that class privilege, and genetic laboratory assisted procreation, can seem to make breeders out of gestational surrogates.

The Child the Stork Brought Home has been used in Women's Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Science and Technology, Bioethics and Contemporary Studies classes at UCSC, UCLA, and U. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The film was made at the Center for Visual Anthropology, at the University of Southern California.

An accompanying essay, "Body Boundaries, Fiction of the Female Self: An ethnographic perspective on power, feminism and reproductive technologies," has been published in Feminist Studies (Spring 2000, V.26, N.1, 113-140).

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Two Video Reports from China

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 08:58:00 GMT

Two Video Reports from China
Buy Now: $320.00

In response to an invitation from the Chinese government, twenty-three American family planning workers from the fields of medicine, public health, media and administration spent seventeen days during August and September of 1977 in the People's Republic of China studying its birth control, maternity and child care methods and facilities.

This DVD contains two video reports made during this trip: In China Family Planning is No Private Matter (32 min), and Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine (22 min).

On this trip, they inquired about the government's methods of surveillance that were instrumental in conducting the declared policy of "one child per family" and observed its consequences in factories and communes. In their effort to comprehend the breadth of the government's health care policies, they recorded the extensive use of herbal therapy and acupuncture. Here is presented their recording of a birth by caesarian section using acupuncture as the sole anesthetic. Shortly afterward they talked with the mother as she celebrated the birth of a healthy son.

The People-to-People China Trip was led by Phyllis Vineyard and Margaret Whitman and was facilitated by Planned Parenthood USA as part of its exploration of the methods and consequences of family planning worldwide.

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That Our Children Will Not Die

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 08:57:00 GMT

That Our Children Will Not Die
Buy Now: $320.00

Nigeria, with over 75 million people, is the most populous state in sub-Saharan Africa. It is also among the most richly endowed in natural, mineral, and oil resources. In spite of rapid modernization, Nigeria continues to have one of the highest mortality rates in the world, particularly among children and mothers. Many of the health problems that afflict the population are in fact preventable, such as malnutrition and infection, fever, diarrhea, coughs. In many cases simple cures are effective and easily administered by non-professionals. This film, sponsored by the Ford Foundation and produced by the Institute of Child Health of the University of Lagos, examines three different community-based approaches to the delivery of primary health care services in culturally and geographically distinct regions of Nigeria.

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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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The Women's Olamal

Fri, 24 Aug 2018 12:25:00 GMT

The Women's Olamal
Buy Now: $340.00

"If you bear children, your husband loves you. A woman who hasn't given birth is like a wilderness. And when her husband dies, if she has no children, she'll be shooed away by the sons of his other wives."

The Women's Olamal follows the events that preceded a controversial ceremony in Loita, Kenya, to bless the women and to increase their ability to have children. This film, presented in observational style with limited commentary, depicts some of the tensions between men and women in Maasai society which, in this case, erupt in a violent row between them. Explanations and insights are portrayed in interviews with the women themselves.The events are seen through the eyes of four women: Nolpiyaya and Kisaju, who have four and nine children respectively; Nolmeeyu, a barren woman near menopause; and Kisaro, who is beginning to worry that after ten years of marriage, she too may be barren.

Loita is a Maasai district which is now divided in two by the international border between Kenya and Tanzania. This political partition complicates the women's aspirations for a ceremony. There was a rumor that another ceremony was to be held in the Tanzanian section of Loita to wash away the sin of a homicide, yet tradition dictates that ceremonies connected with death are not to be held in the same season as those for fertility.

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