Savanah Leaf

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I don’t think it was until my third viewing of the film that I finally heard its opening question: “Why should we care that you make it?” It’s this disembodied voice of authority directed at a young woman about whether or not it should matter that she gains custody over her child. Maybe I dismissed the question because it felt so dismissive of its subject, but I think it’s important in how it creates a framework for experiencing the film. Why did you open with this question?

SL

The question came from Erika Alexander, who plays Miss Carmen, the social worker facilitating this support group, of which Gia is also part. That day, I told Erika, “If you want to go off script and ask further questions, go ahead.” When she asked, “Why should we care that you make it?” I was like, “Yes, that’s it.” It was the same question I gave myself while writing the film. Can an audience ever feel for someone like Gia? A black mother who makes—I don’t know what to call it—a mistake, or someone who has to make a pivotal decision. So many people are thinking as they’re watching this film, “Why should anyone care about these mothers, whether they win custody?”

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Which are also questions about what it takes to recognize someone’s humanness.

SL

Right. Tiffany Garner, the woman answering that question, responded amazingly: “You will never be able to walk in my shoes. But you can walk beside me.“ Tiffany was one of the five mothers in my documentary, The Heart Still Hums. While I had written and asked the women to pick from some dialogues, I also asked them if there was anything else they wanted to share. A lot of the women shared these very personal accounts. Tiffany articulated the challenge in this story the most visually: Can you walk beside her throughout this journey? Can you be present with and for her?

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Depicting judgment and justification, both visually and verbally, is a huge part of the developing story.

SL

Exactly. Throughout the film, the question lingers around how the judge will rule in Gia’s case for custody. When Erika asked, “Why should we care?” I knew it should be the introduction to the film because it becomes this framework for living with Gia’s story, but it also sets you up for the eventual moment at which Gia, who doesn’t ever speak her mind, finally finds it within herself to advocate on her own behalf.

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I think, too, as black women, we can be very accustomed to these different contexts of interrogation, to having to explain or prove oneself and especially being asked to prove oneself fit to mother.

SL

I like what you just said about feeling like you have to prove yourself because I think about the structure of that feeling all the time. I have felt this weight my entire life—the question of constantly having to prove myself and justify my actions or selfhood. This feeling resonates at the utmost level for Gia because, as the birth mother, she is the one who carried her children for nine months herself and now has to prove she’s fit to parent. Furthermore, how do you prove yourself when the system itself is set up for you to fail?

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Erika Alexander gives this incredible line, “You have a few hours to decide before the state decides for you.” In terms of judgment, these moments throughout the film complicate what agency might mean in navigating the demands of the foster care system.

SL

For example, what are the choices available to Gia? When the rules and regulations are impossible to meet because the target is constantly moving, what do you do? Adapting to your circumstances is one thing, but changing your situation while struggling to find hope is another. How do you make money, pay child support, make it to visitations, and also do your work? Even if you’ve never personally been through that situation—the feeling we were talking about, of never being enough, is universal.

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I was really moved by the closing testimony from Anankha Pereira, one of the mothers from the support group. She says, “I don’t know if I’m more angry with my mother for doing what she could with what she had or if I’m angrier that I’m doing the same with my children. I want to protect them like they need to be protected, but nobody was there to protect me.” How did you two meet?

SL

Anankha’s amazing. We were casting teenagers for a couple of scenes at Gia’s workplace when I met her. I saw this young girl at this street fair and thought she would be great, so I went up to her. We were talking for a minute, and then Anankha came up and was like, “Don’t talk to my kid. Come to me first.” [Laughs.]

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[Laughs.] Understandable.

SL

Right. I was like, “Okay, respect. Definitely, I shouldn’t have done that. I should have gone to you first.” When we got to talking about the role, Anankha expressed her own interest in the film, that the story resonated with her on a personal level, and we decided that she would join the film. That day, while we were on set, I asked Anankha if there was anything else she wanted to share. She was an open book and shared so much. She said, “No one was there to protect me.” Which is simple and quiet but devastating if you’ve been there yourself. When she said it the first time, it hit me so hard. It’s hard for anyone to parent with the weight of their own life, their own childhood. I don’t think of it as a cycle so much as a policing system. And when you’re put in that system, how do you get out?

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And how do you protect your children when the question of “Who protects me?” has always been answered by “I do.”

SL

Yes. I think we forget to ask, “Who is protecting our mothers? Who is caring for them?”

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Can you speak about how you visualized Gia’s connection to her lineage?

SL

I wanted to set the story in the present tense, and I also wanted to explore how our circumstances position the resources and opportunities available to us. I didn’t want to rely so heavily on the trope of justification by offering the backstory of Gia’s mother—and her mother’s mother—but I did want a relationship to the past to be felt within the film.

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And by a relationship to the past, you mean not just Gia’s lineage but her relationship to what she wants to break from and hold onto.

SL

Yes. I wanted to show the internal experiences that link us to previous generations and the intergenerational traumas we aren’t always aware of, but that do affect us. There’s beauty in that lineage, too.

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In filmically describing those internal experiences, you lean on a kind of visual surrealism. For instance, Gia can sometimes escape her immediate reality by retreating into this meditative inner world—a landscape of redwoods introduced through a narrative documentary voice and its description of root systems. The more visually jarring end of this, perhaps in its disturbance of codes of representation around the female form and its anatomical possibilities, are moments in which Gia witnesses the impossible extension of an umbilical cord from her own navel. Both the root and the umbilical cord, of course, hold such cultural weight as symbols of attachment and severance, but I also want to talk about how these images stretch the film’s timescape. For me, that moment positioned Gia as at once both mother and infant. That was important to how I received her story because while before, I was thinking primarily about Gia’s maternity and protection of her child’s future, now, I’m thinking about Gia’s own infancy, vulnerability, and lineage.

SL

Exactly. In those moments when you’re thinking about the navel and the umbilical cord, it’s not just about Gia’s connection to her child, it’s also about the link to her mother—lineage thinking. It’s not just about Gia and the situation that she is in with her child, but it is about Gia having once been a child herself. It was about posing the question, “What is that attachment? And when that cord to your mother is cut, what do you feel? But also, who do you belong to?” I was thinking about the longing to keep that attachment close as much as to break away.

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Though we’re mostly talking about maternal relationships, the navel doesn’t have the same mutable gendered implications that reproductive organs or sexual organs might. In terms of an American cultural benchmark, I’m thinking of [Toni] Morrison’s The Song of Solomon—how the absence of a navel so importantly marks the character Pilate. The navel is a kind of evidence of one’s humanness, that someone carried and gave birth to you. Why keep returning to that image?

SL

My sister was born when I was sixteen, and I remember watching the remnants of the umbilical cord dry out and then drop off. For some reason, that process blew my mind and stayed with me, in a way, all of this time. It’s been exciting seeing how different people respond to that moment.

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How so?

SL

It’s funny because a lot of people who have kids themselves forget about that specific moment. When they saw the movie, they were like, “What is that?” I’m like, “Don’t you remember”[Laughter.] It’s such a powerful and significant bonding experience, too, to share that moment with a sibling.

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That relationship between birth mother and adoptive sister becomes important to this film’s arc, too. When Gia eventually meets with a potential adoptive family, you get the sense she sees herself in the teenage daughter, Amber, who still has the dreams (namely, playing basketball at SF State), that Gia had for herself before her life was reoriented to the protection of her children. As a viewer, that the pivotal connection and intimacy Gia finds with this adoptive family is not with adoptive mother, but with the daughter, Amber, was such a wonderful subversion of my expectations.

SL

Well, the first draft of the script was actually based on a few core interactions. One was their meeting, and the other was at the hospital just after Gia had given birth. Both scenes were informed by my experience meeting my sister’s birth mother and her asking me to cut the umbilical cord— pivotal moments of my own life. In terms of the meeting, we both were really quiet. In the film, you’ve got Miss Carmen, you’ve got both parents, and then you have Gia, who’s thinking, “Maybe I want to go through this, or maybe I don’t.” There are so many questions, and the only person who’s like, I don’t know, but I’m here, is the adoptive sister. I think that quietness helped the film because sometimes, everyone else has such clear motives in these spaces.

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Neither of them is firmly attached to one outcome.

SL

Yeah, and Gia’s thinking maybe this teenager is the most honest window into what her child’s life could look like. In speaking about herself, Amber is telling Gia something about the possibilities for Gia’s child. Honestly, I based both Gia and the sister on myself in certain ways. And they also see themselves in one another. Immediately finding their similarities (in basketball, in their dreams for themselves) is a nice way for them to immediately find intimacy with one another, on their own terms. It was really important to the story that through this decision-making process, Gia could find a place where she felt comforted in some way.

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Your filmic work began with music video direction, so you come to this with a certain attention to rhythm and musicality. Can you speak to me about the soundscape of this film and your collaboration with Kelsey Lu?

SL

Kelsey Lu is an incredible musician. When we were looking for a composer, we had already edited the whole film, and I had these playlists I’d made when I was writing—I had a Bay Area playlist with music I grew up with in the Bay and was also thinking about the music that would take Gia through her inner world. I had all these reference tracks in the edit, and then Lu came up. We initially asked her to do the credit song of Earth Mama, but when I met her, it became immediately apparent that Lu would be excellent at scoring the whole film. One of her songs is in The Heart Still Hums, which served as emotional research for the feature film. But in meeting, it was instant—we sat down and talked, and she understood the film on a very dynamic, personal level.

Lu is classically trained but also has this fluid, intuitive instinct that resonated deeply with me. I grew up playing sports, so I understand conditioning on a physical level, and witnessing her as an artist and musician, she’s so regimented—there is no limitation to the craft with her. She did the whole score in just over a week. The songs were initially composed with a mixture of electronic and cello instrumentals. Lu usually incorporates her voice in her music, so instrumentals are not what she is necessarily known for. We also worked with different musicians like Brandy Younger, a harpist, and Moses Boyd, who did the drumming we used as a stand-in for the heartbeat throughout the film at various times. We also had the pianist, Mikael Darmanie, come in, and the way he plays the piano just takes you—it almost feels like the fluttering of a heart. If not the heart, something flutters inside of you. Lu had several musicians improvise over what she had initially composed for the image and pick and choose what moments felt right to emphasize.

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I wanted to ask you about the heartbeat. There’s such a close relationship between the physicality of Gia’s pregnancy and the film’s soundscape. Maybe most obviously so during the sideshow scene. There’s a Lil B song blasting, tires screeching, and on top of that, all these voices of the crowd. That created such a feeling of building anxiety in me but was also very much in line with Gia’s physical experience of her pregnancy and its progression. I’m also now thinking about the centrality of sound to the title of your previous film, The Heart Still Hums.

SL

Yes, there was a woman in The Heart Still Hums, and what she said has always stuck with me because it’s so beautiful and wasn’t scripted. She told us when she gave her child up, her body wanted to hold her child, and her soul was humming. Her breasts were sore, and she wanted to breastfeed. This moment is where the title comes from, and this way of thinking is also how we decided to approach making the score in Earth Mama. The music, as well as “How do we create this kind of hum, this lingering?” The score feels very much in response to Gia rather than leading the story. We’re not making a judgment. We’re trying to respond.

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You mentioned a playlist earlier. What were some of those songs?

SL

It’s funny, some of the songs are now in the film, playing through speakers or in the background. Lil B made a track for the sideshow scene. There’s also the song “No Hoe” from D-Lo, which is so specific. If you’re from the Bay Area, you probably remember listening to these songs or hearing that bass line rolling up to a party. It has the most memorable and specific baseline. And there’s “On My Momma” by Team Knoc. The music supervisor, Sunny Kapoor, and I included songs referencing Mamas from completely different perspectives. We had “Keep it on the Real” from 3X Krazy, which everyone’s heard a billion times, especially if you listen to 106.1 radio station religiously. That’s a late-nineties song that plays in the car. These little references exist, but I don’t know if everyone will resonate with them unless they’re from the Bay. [Laughs.]

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You moved from London to the Bay when you were seven. What’s your relationship to the Bay now?

SL

My mother and sister still live there, so that’s a big part, but yes, the Bay made me who I am. It’s music, its culture around speaking up for what you believe in, the fact that as a kid, my classmates’ parents were founding members of the Black Panther party—all of that had a huge impact on me.

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We’ve talked a bit about musicians from the Bay who impacted you. Are there other artists you were thinking about as you made Earth Mama?

SL

Kara Walker’s watercolors and silhouettes had a big impact on this story. Toni Morrison and her writings on motherhood. There’s a moment in Earth Mama when the TV is playing this documentary about spiders and how they mother, and another bit of dialogue between two men about how crab spiders sacrifice themselves to their children, how the mothers allow themselves to be eaten entirely. So, I’d also say I was influenced by nature documentaries. Then there’s Boots Riley, a Bay Area filmmaker and musician and one of the people who encouraged me very early on. I met him while volunteering at the San Francisco Film Festival and told him how much I appreciated his work. He sat down with me and said, “Oh, you just have to write. You have to write a script.” He’s the first filmmaker that encouraged me to write. And then there’s my mother, who used to be an animator and is now a set dresser for computer animations. She was always interested in the arts and always encouraged me to think creatively. That’s all part of who I am today.

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Since leaving professional volleyball and graduating from the University of Miami University in 2014, you’ve worked in music video, narrative, and documentary filmmaking. I imagine the past years have wrought a lot of change in your relationship with your creative professional life. How are you thinking of the role of film in your life now? What’s your hope for Earth Mama’s life moving forward?

SL

For a long time, I felt the goal of filmmaking was to put us in someone else’s shoes. It was that testimony from Tiffany Garner that you and I were speaking about earlier that made me ask different questions about the role of art in my life. We can’t possibly walk in anybody else’s shoes, but maybe the goal—not just of art, but also of being here—is to walk beside one another. I wish that for anyone watching this film, and I wish that for myself.