By Tessa Moran
We’ve recently been hired to make a documentary about an independent birth center in NE Washington, DC. It is the only independent birthing center in the district that provides gynecological, obstetric and pediatric health care services to low-income women and their families.
The film will focus on the lives of African American women health care providers who work at the center. Its intent is to motivate young African American girls to enter the health care profession, with the knowledge that there are opportunities at any level and that health care can be a fulfilling profession.
One woman who works as a breast-feeding peer counselor, was a patient at the center as a pregnant teenager and now counsels other women who share her same experience. Another long-time DC resident and single mom is training to be a nurse part-time while she works as an office assistant and case manager. Another works as a midwife, and passionately talks about how much she loves her job.
Snafoo #1
Our shoot went really well, but not without our fair share of snafoos. Two days prior to the shoot was the first time we turned on our camera since we sent it to Canon for a minor tape deck cleaning over a month ago. When we turned it on, we noticed that the aperture, focus and zoom rings did not work. Something must have been broken in the process of the cleaning, and we quickly realized our error in not inspecting the camera immediately after it was returned. Now our warranty had expired and we were just two days away from our big shoot!
Fortunately, a friend of ours bought the exact same camera for his job at an independent polling company in DC. He and his boss were kind enough to let us borrow it for the day while our own camera was being shipped to Canon for repairs.
Lighting, and an unusual interview location
We also rented a set of lights for the day – a pair of Westcott Spiderlites. The result was fantastic – the lights provided a very nice soft light that was daylight balanced, so they matched the light of the sun which was acting as a back light.
The setting for the interviews was a big birthing room that was decorated like a bedroom, with a bed, curtains, pictures and candles. Our subjects sat on a chair in front of the bed, and the colorful pillows and headboard served as an interesting backdrop. One subject talked about how comfortable she felt birthing her own child in the room. The setting of the interviews will serve as a symbol of the home-like natural care offered at the center.
The only issue we ran into with our lighting was that two of the subjects were wearing hats, which shaded their eyes. In retrospect we should have asked them to take off their hats, so that their eyes would be better lit. But the faint shadows are just a minor issue – the interviews still look great.
Increasing confidence
Filming this project has been much easier than filming the last. We are working in our own country, our own city. Now we can digitize our footage, screen it, and send out audio files of the interviews to be transcribed. We had no access to a computer during our last film. Consequently, we relied on spotty notes and memory. And it wasn’t until months after that we were able to start loading and organizing our footage – seeing all of our successes and mistakes.
For the birth center project, our subjects all speak English fluently, unlike our subjects in “Keeping the Kibbutz.” They are all fully invested in the mission and intent of the film, which wasn’t necessarily the case with our subjects in the kibbutz film. Our filming in Israel was very exploratory. We didn’t know what we were intending to say. Rather, we were hoping to discover the story through filming. We did eventually find it, but I’m not sure our subjects really understood what we were doing or why we found their lives interesting.
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