EARTH MAMA -Interview Savanah Leaf

Q: Earth Mama has a unique feel to it, combining elements of clear-eyed social realism with sudden moments of whimsical magical realism, and yet it also feels personal. What was the inspiration behind wanting to tell this story of a single, pregnant mother in the Bay Area?

Savanah Leaf: The inspiration was all the mothers who have made a big impact on my own life—and they take many different shapes and forms. The film for me is about maternity, not just in the sense of pregnancy, but about all these different types of maternal figures who appear in your life whether it be your best friend or a teacher or maybe a mother who isn’t your mother by blood, but they are there for you in that way. I grew up in quite a small family of almost all women. I never knew my father. So, I surrounded myself with people who created a larger family around me. I thought of this film as an ode to all those people.

Another big influence was a short documentary I made with Taylor Russell, “The Heart Still Hums,” which is about single mothers who are fighting to be with their kids in the foster care system, or who have recently given up their children to adoption. From that experience, I knew I wanted to create a film that does not ever judge a mother in a tough situation but gives her a fully layered story and humanity. When it comes to Black women and Black mothers, you have to take into consideration that it often feels that society is expecting you to make mistakes, and the system is ready to close doors off to you. I wanted to go inside these conflicting feelings of Black women — the desire for motherhood, the fear of motherhood, the differing social and personal expectations of motherhood.

Q: We are pulled into the lush inner life of Gia beyond her struggles with the child welfare and foster systems because of these beautiful, shimmering glimpses we get into her imagination and daydreams. What compelled you to break out in moments from the conventional structure of social realism?

SL: From the beginning I posed a question to myself: is there a way an audience can empathize with a person who took drugs while she was pregnant—and not come to a snap judgment of who she is? How do you build a deeper picture of this person, a picture of her joys, her fears, and her longings? To really get to all that Gia feels inside, it just seemed to call for a more surreal perspective. Early on in the writing, I was thinking a lot about the umbilical cord, this physical attachment to your mother that is like the root of a tree, and what that means, so that became an image
I started to play with. And I also wanted to bring in the natural world surrounding the Bay Area—the ocean and the forest—which can relate to innate maternal feelings.

Q: And then you have Gia working in the Photo Magic store in the mall where she’s setting up perfect life moments all day long—young couples, graduates, families with new babies which becomes another kind of portal into her inner life.

SL: Her job is working with all these different ideas of family and providing these mementos of perfect happiness. She’s arranging people’s dresses or telling them how to pose or how
to look nice as a family and all those things create an image or idea of family that she doesn’t have but she yearns for. So that naturally felt like it could become a window into her unseen desires.

Q: It seems the only place Gia feels any agency over her life is in these private moments of contemplation or imagination. She’s really caught in a Catch-22. She can’t get through this
alone but relying on others goes against all her gut instincts and life experiences. Yet, we see her starting to reach out, exploring the idea of trust.

SL: The system has really failed Gia, so I don’t know how it’s possible for her to trust in that system. She’s found so little support and people seem so quick to turn on her. She’s had to build a tough exterior and she holds onto that. But I think she is learning to trust, with her friend Mel in particular and even with the social worker Miss Carmen, she wants to trust her even if something is telling her to be careful.

SL: cont…  careful. It’s something that’s a big part of Gia and it’s a big part of a lot of Black women I know. Who have we been able to trust? How do we learn to trust? Even with someone like Miss Carmen there’s always that question in the back of Gia’s mind of ‘is she really here for me?’ or ‘are there ulterior motives here?’ There are questions of trust for all the characters and that’s something I was very interested in exploring.

Q: It feels like you did a lot of research not only into the institutions of child welfare and foster care—all the rules and rigid structures of those life-altering bureaucracies–but into the people inside those worlds and what they experience.

SL: That was really important to me. I worked with a researcher, read a lot, but also just talked to many, many people. I dove in as deep as I could. I was really fascinated by how even the paperwork that social workers do in order to say someone is fit to parent is so bureaucratic and full of checklists and doesn’t seem to respond to what being a parent is about. It’s such a clinical and dehumanizing way of evaluating motherhood—and I was interested in how that makes people feel on both sides of the equation. We also worked with several organizations including Black Mothers United, Chicks in Crisis, and a Black doula organization. And a lot of the non-actors who we cast in the film were people connected to these organizations, as well as people we randomly met on the streets who had stories that related to this. You’d give them a prompt and they would just tell you these incredibly moving tales from their own lives. It was amazing and sad and frustrating to realize how many people have been a part of these systems.

Q: You feature women who have children in the system but also the voices of men who grew up in the foster system, which is another side of this story.

SL: The two guys in the film who talk about growing up in the foster care system really helped to guide me with their own authentic stories. They were so keen to share these parts of themselves because they really want people to understand. The children that the mothers give birth to are a natural extension of the mothers’ stories.

Q: Were there any specific films that you were thinking about while writing?

SL: A film that really stood out to me was Ken Loach’s Ladybird, Ladybird. It has some similarities to Earth Mama but it’s also very different. I also looked at Pedro Costa’s Ossos,
which explores different sides of motherhood, including the darker sides. And then I also did a lot of research into the traditions of Black mothers in folk tales and artwork throughout history. Those influences aren’t in the film in a way that I can point to specifically, but I think it’s all present somehow in the fabric of it.

Q: The Oakland rapper Tia Nomore gives such a bold debut performance as Gia. She is able to lend a revealing transparency to a woman who is anything but transparent in how she presents herself to the world. How did you end up casting a first-time actor?

SL: We were searching for quite a while for Gia, in part because we were looking at both actors and non-actors. I liked the idea of having a performer, a rapper or a poet, someone who has that ability to hold your attention because Gia is in almost every second of the film. It was also important to me to find someone from the Bay Area and someone who felt a deep relationship to motherhood in some form. I also knew we needed someone who could show all the layers Gia is holding within her.  Our casting directors went out to a lot of different people, and one of them was Tia. When I saw her audition tape, I felt I’d found Gia. Tia had just had a child a year prior, so she was still tapped into the emotional weight of that, and she had that physical familiarity with how you carry yourself when you’re pregnant. She’d also been training to become a doula to Black families, so she brought a lot of personal connections to the film’s story.