Early on in "Earth Mama," a quietly shattering first feature from writer-director Savanah Leaf, we find ourselves in a room with a Black woman named Gia (Tia Nomore) as she spends time with her young son, Trey (Ca'Ron Coleman). It's a drab, anonymous-looking room, with bare walls and a few toys scattered perfunctorily about, but Leaf and her cinematographer, Jody Lee Lipes, use the space to tell a story in intimate, heartrending miniature.
The camera, never blinking, slowly pulls back to reveal Gia's daughter, Shaynah (Alexis Rivas), sitting by herself, clearly too upset to talk to or play with her mom (she was late, there was traffic). And in time, it moves back even farther to reveal another woman standing in the background, alerting us, if we didn't know already, that this isn't an unsupervised visit.
Gia is a single woman trying to regain custody of her two kids, who have been in foster care for some time. At present, she sees Shaynah and Trey for just one supervised hour a week; Gia spends the rest of her time working at a photo store and taking court-ordered classes meant to establish (or discredit) her fitness as a mother. Other details flicker briefly into the foreground: her history of drug use, the waning account balance on her phone card. Another quietly but insistently announces itself in scene after scene: Gia is pregnant with her third child, due to arrive in just a few weeks.
