Gail in court, in Baby Doe. Courtesy of Baby Doe, LLC
Film festivals are all about discoveries, but in recent years, it’s gotten ever so hard to find true under-the-radar gems in U.S. nonfiction filmmaking. While Sundance long provided the latest crop of American documentaries to rave about, it’s now SXSW that increasingly seems to be taking up the national mantle. To be clear, Sundance is still the first stop for top-notch international surprises on these shores. And yet attendees can easily become frustrated with all the streamer-attached—or aesthetically designed to become streamer-attached—feature-length selections overwhelming the lineup historically dedicated to the “American indie.” Indeed, it’s hard to justify spending 90 minutes of limited festival time watching a doc the world will soon catch on HBO, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and so on in the blink of an eye.
Which is not the case with SXSW. While the Austin behemoth undoubtedly has its share of buzzy (i.e., some combination of the true crime, music, and celebrity genre) documentaries, navigating through the admittedly unwieldy program can also be a fun treasure hunt. In the end, you’re likely to be gifted with at least a handful of inspiring U.S. nonfiction films no one is talking about yet.
For me, this latest edition (March 7–15) began with the added bonus of a trio of female-helmed films, all focused in different ways on one virtually off-the-radar topic: motherhood and its intersection with the law. This can get even more complicated when an expecting mom refuses to believe she’s even carrying, as in Baby Doe. Director-producer-DP Jessica Earnshaw notes in the director’s statement for her world-premiering Documentary Feature Competition selection: “At its heart, Baby Doe is a film about a woman in a moment of crisis, struggling to understand herself and her choices. It is about how denial can shape our lives and make us mysteries unto ourselves. And finally, it is about how we make peace with our past when the walls of denial are at last broken down.”
This intimately-crafted doc follows a happily married, conservative Christian grandmother in rural Ohio who long ago did something inexplicable, even to herself—she left her stillborn baby in the woods after giving birth all alone in a bathroom at work. And perhaps just as inexplicable is the fact that not only did no one around Gail Ritchey (not even the father/now husband) ever suspect that she was pregnant, but neither did Ritchey herself, having succumbed to what is now termed “pregnancy denial.” None of which is of any importance to law enforcement, sadly, who now 30 years later and with proof of DNA, decide to charge her with aggravated murder—a sentence of 20 years to life to add to the traumatized woman’s pain.
Ritchey is unfortunately not alone in her predicament, as Earnshaw, whose debut feature Jacinta won the Albert Maysles Best New Documentary Director Award at Tribeca 2020, makes crystal clear. In addition to today’s teenage mothers in pregnancy denial being charged in the deaths of their newborns (the case of another Ohioan, Emilie Weaver, is touched on briefly in the film), forensic genealogy has now allowed state authorities to go after many middle-aged and elderly women, charging them with the deaths of newborns abandoned lifetimes ago. This could make one wonder if all these arrests are really just an easy way for an overzealous attorney general to make a name for himself through the headline-grabbing “monster mother” trope. Who the law is actually serving remains frustratingly opaque.
As is also the case with Elaine Epstein’s (State of Denial, Nothing Without Us: The Women Who Will End Aids) Arrest the Midwife, likewise world-premiering in the Documentary Feature Competition, which follows a real-life story even stranger and more outrageous than its title might imply. After the death of a newborn, a trio of midwives serving Amish and Mennonite communities in upstate New York are, one by one, taken into custody for illegally practicing midwifery. In this case, as the midwife being held directly responsible for the baby’s demise explains to Epstein’s non-intrusive lens, the moment complications presented she rushed the mother to the hospital—where medical staff proceeded to make all the wrong moves. (It’s easier to arrest a rural midwife than to hold the medical-industrial complex accountable for malpractice.) But rather than stay silent as birthing providers in this healthcare desert insidiously disappear, these horse and buggy-driving pacifists fight back by engaging in civic action with the outside world.
Several of the technology-shunning Christian women, including the sole Mennonite arrested, have chosen to join the two non-Mennonite baby catchers charged (one of whom has 14 children and 26 grandchildren of her own); and allowed a gay, Jewish South African from Brooklyn cast them as the collective heroines of her eye-opening documentary film. Notably, Epstein has referred to her visual approach as being deeply influenced by Amish and Mennonite norms. She even involves the participants in the filmmaking process itself, right down to encouraging her interviewees to sit in the director’s chair and help frame their own shots. This process allows these soft-spoken women to have a say in how they were portrayed, and a sense of agency in how their story was told. The sheer act of waiting to be invited in seemed to have opened many normally bolted doors. All in all, the film’s production (an IDA Enterprise Fund grantee) is a giant leap of faith into compassionate patient hands.
The same analogy could also be applied to the star of Anayansi Prado’s (Maid in America, The Unafraid) Uvalde Mom, which world premiered in the Documentary Spotlight program. As its title tragically alludes, this respectful doc centers around a mother in Uvalde, Texas whose children were attending class at Robb Elementary on the day of the infamous mass shooting in May 2022. Angeli Rose Gomez was the mom who went viral for rushing into the school—and safely out with her two sons even as hundreds of officers waited around and did nothing for an unconscionable 77 minutes. (Instead, they maintained crowd control to prevent other parents from following in Gomez’s footsteps.) For her heroism, this petite unarmed single mother was rewarded not with an honorary badge but with relentless harassment from the men in blue she’d publicly emasculated.
While award-winning director-producer Prado does delve deep into the jaw-dropping incompetence of the local authorities and their gross statewide effort to cover it up, she’s much more concerned with the preternaturally brave and disarmingly calm woman at the center of the storm. Gomez is not only a survivor of the Uvalde shooting but also of domestic violence that derailed her earlier hopes and dreams, which garnered the former star student a criminal record. Unlike the men who violated their oath to serve and protect, Gomez decided that dedication to the community and its collective fight for justice is something worth putting her life on the line for.
Lauren Wissot is a film critic and journalist, filmmaker and programmer, and a contributing editor at both Filmmaker magazine and Documentary magazine. She also writes regularly for Modern Times Review (The European Documentary Magazine) and has served as the director of programming at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival.