The opening of the film Earth Mama is probably one of the most striking you’ll see this awards season. A candid, unaffected monologue - it had me in tears within minutes, though it wasn’t the work of some Oscar-nominee but rather of a real woman who’d been cast because of her lived experience.
Within minutes the viewer is plunged into a taut world of systemic oppression and into the mind of a formidable new filmmaking talent: 30-year-old writer/ director Savanah Leaf.
“A few years ago, I made a short documentary called The Heart Still Hums,” she tells me, explaining how the opening of Earth Mama came about, “which ended up being kind of emotional research for the film.”
The 2020 documentary, co-directed by Leaf and her friend, the actress Taylor Russell, focused on the plight of five women fighting for their children through homelessness and drug addiction - and on the work of two nonprofit organisations helping them.
“And she was one of the women that was utilising these nonprofits because her kids had been recently taken from her.” When the woman saw herself in Earth Mama, Leaf explains, “she literally broke down in my arms…because those were her words. It's not like they were scripted.” In the years between the documentary and Earth Mama, she had managed to regain custody of her children “and she’d been telling me that she wanted to do public speaking and share her story - so in a way, that was her publicly speaking, through the film. She was so excited.”
Earth Mama is Leaf’s first feature length film and, like that mesmerising opening, manages to be deeply moving without ever becoming cloying or overblown - it is a stark, elemental, beautiful account of one young woman’s struggle to regain custody of her two children, and avoid having her third (she’s heavily pregnant throughout the film) taken away at birth.
It has earned the London-born, California-raised Leaf a well-deserved Bafta win for best debut British Writer, Director or Producer. “Which is really exciting,” she says. The film premiered at Sundance Film Festival, and was out in UK cinemas in December, “so [the Bafta] feels like a really nice way to remind people that this movie exists and get them excited to watch it.”
What’s most striking about it is how it deftly resists both sentimentality or judgement - in many ways the protagonist, Gia played by first time actress Tia Nomore, is clearly the victim of a punitive system that forces already marginalised parents into ever more desperate circumstances.
In one scene, for instance, Gia pleads with her social worker that, with so many court-mandated rehab classes and group therapy sessions she can’t take on the necessary hours at work to find more stable housing (or pay child support - in the US parents are required to contribute financially to their children in foster care). The social worker shrugs her off.
Equally, though, there are moments in which Gia is clearly an agent of her own destruction.
Leaf pulls-off this moral tightrope walk by keeping the action focused on the here and now. We never meet the father of Gia’s children or learn how she fell pregnant, we sense that she may have had a difficult upbringing, though it’s never explored.
The tight focus of the storytelling means we’re given no respite from Gia’s lived reality. “I wanted to focus on the everyday systemic pressures that someone like Gia might face,” says Leaf. “What does it feel like to wake up, do a pee test, have to go to these classes and also try to make enough money to not only survive but also to pay child support to your children’s foster family? I wanted to show these everyday pressures rather than glossing over them because they felt more insightful, and gave you a better sense of why and how someone might be forced to give up a child.”
When it came to first screening the film, Leaf invited many of the non-profits and people she’d met through making The Heart Still Hums. “And a lot of them were coming up afterwards…saying, like, I felt so scared to share my story, because there's so much discrimination against mothers who might have gone through a difficult patch in their life [but that] ââthis kind of enabled them to talk to their friends about it and just have a more open conversation. That was amazing.”
That “emotional research” also gave her another perspective on her own upbringing.
Raised by a single mother, she says it made her reassess her own quick judgement of absentee parents, like her father. “Over time, you know, listening to these mothers, it started to feel like there are so many circumstances, so many layers to being a parent, and a black parent, so many layers to being young and not knowing what decisions you're making…it forced me to just sit and listen. And oftentimes, we don't do that, we don’t sit and listen to parents that aren't parenting - we just don’t give them the space, you know?”
Her mother, an animator, moved the family to California for work when Leaf was 10-years-old (Leaf blames her very American accent on her desperation to assimilate as quickly as possible). Then, when Leaf was 16, much like some of the storylines in Earth Mama, her mother adopted a baby. She knew all along that the emotional weight of that decision was something she wanted to explore in the film. “It was this crazy moment where I got to meet my sister’s birth mother; I even cut my sister's umbilical cord. Like, it was so huge for me. My sister shifted my world view. Leading up to me writing the scripts, I always knew that that moment in my life was so pivotal.”
The upcoming election is terrifying for women's rights, for the safety of mothers, the safety of young people and of children, too
Proximity to Hollywood isn’t what sparked her interest in filmmaking; in fact, Leaf took something of a non-traditional route into writing and directing in that, at 18, she was playing volleyball for Team GB in the 2012 Olympics then afterwards attended University of Miami on a sports scholarship. After university, she went back to playing professional volleyball - sport was, she says, the only career path she’d ever truly considered despite the fact that it was far from her passion.
“I feel like my mental state [when I was playing] sport was really rough. Because it was so miserable.” She recounts the monotony of days spent training and practising, broken-up by the occasional opportunity to make music with some of the other women on the squad, “which was the most exciting time of my day,” she laughs. “Because it allowed me to think differently for a second. Mentally and emotionally, I really struggled with [the repetition of training].” Tall and naturally athletic, since school she’d always been encouraged to pursue sports. “I have this natural talent - but I'm not the type of person that wakes up every morning and wants to go for a jog, that’s not me at all and I don’t want to spend my life working out.” In the end, injury stopped her sports career from progressing. She decamped to London to learn the basics of video production and do a masters at Central Saint Martin’s.
When it came to writing the script for Earth Mama, she found the old dictum - that her body was the instrument through which she should be engaging with the world - cast a long shadow. “It has taken me so long to move from ‘athlete’ to ‘writer’; I think as an athlete the world tells you that you're stupid, you're some jock. In my head I was always like, ‘I'm probably the worst writer, my vocabulary is terrible, I wish people would just tell me that it's bad so I can move on.’”
Luckily, it wasn’t bad and Leaf didn’t move on. Her boyfriend was one of the first people she showed it to, she says, alongside one of the producers for the film. “And they both told me that there was something there…even just a small amount of encouragement pushed me onto the journey.” Leaf splits her time between London - Vauxhall, to be precise - and New York, where she lives with her boyfriend. She has just gotten her American citizenship.
I wonder how the looming election - and the possibility of a second Trump presidency - impacts her experience of America? “It's really terrifying,” she says. While they were making Earth Mama, “the [overturning of] Roe versus Wade was happening…the film isn't about abortion but it’s operating within the same world - if people aren't able to have abortions, and they feel like they can't raise their kids, adoption and fostering is the only option they’ll have. So the story held a different sort of weight after all that came up - all of a sudden you start thinking about how many people are going to have to deal with [the foster care system] and it's terrifying… I really don’t know what else to say other than, with the election coming up, it’s terrifying for women's rights, for the safety of mothers, the safety of young people and of children, too.”
On the other hand, she adds quickly, “just to give a more hopeful twist, because otherwise I go into a spiral, it has been so powerful to see the amount of people showing up to march for Palestine; all these movements acting [together] - through art, and filmmaking too - it has to go somewhere, eventually. And while it doesn't feel very hopeful at times... I'm still really impressed and empowered by some of these artists and people who are speaking up.”
