WINNER-Best Feature Documentary at the 7th Annual BigMiniDV Fest in New York!
"Birthright takes on the 'unspokens' of motherhood that, when shared,
make us all feel a little better about our own parenting anxieties.
It's an unflinching and startlingly, refreshingly, honest take on mom-bonding."
- Starshine Roshell, Award-winning Journalist and Author of "Keep Your Shirt On"
"Birthright carefully and lovingly engages a diverse group of mothers
who collectively narrate the many joys, burdens, and complexities of
motherhood as shaped by race, class, sexuality, and desire. Through
intimate portraits edited into a compelling dialogue, Shimizu boldly
goes to the sticky, uncertain, and even unpleasant concerns of
contemporary mothers, usually taboo in our culture's fawning
celebrations, while also reminding us of its unparalleled pleasures and
life-changing meanings. Birthright's chorus of women, each speaking
her own experience through a tender and affirming close-up, draws an
inspiring web from the daily experiences and deeper profundities of
distinct mothers who remind us that these experiences allow them to be
deeply human, connected, and female."
- Alex Juhasz, Filmmaker and Professor of Media, Pitzer, Claremont Colleges
BIRTHRIGHT shows how motherhood transforms womanhood today, using the community of Santa Barbara as the setting for one of the most under-represented phenomena in film today. It begins with birthing as a powerful experience that brings together tremendous pain and terror with the beauty of bringing a life into the world. The experience opens up a world where intimate relations with partners, friends and the self transform completely. Three interview formats dramatize the social pressures women face including the physical, moral and psychological burdens of giving birth and rearing young children, what Sharon Hays calls “the cultural contradictions of motherhood.”
The individual interviews reveal the intimacies of new mothering from multi-class and multi-racial perspectives, small groups reveal the unexpected personal transformations at the level of friendship and finally, Latina immigrant mothers living at poverty level, share their disenfranchisements at the level of money, time, space, employment and language and their desire to improve their children’s lives by learning English. Within the incongruent economies and racial divisions in Santa Barbara, I aim to learn about what women undergo in their contemporary mothering. The interviews aim to capture the incredible anxiety, urgency and pressures of mothering so as to open up, deepen and further discussion on what mothers need and how they live today. Concretely, I intend to celebrate the new women born of the experiences of motherhood, to identify their challenges and the ways they reshape the world to better accommodate their needs, hopes and desires.
©2009
Running Time: 75 minutes
Director: Celine Parreñas Shimizu
Read about the making of Birthright
About the Director:
Professor Shimizu works as a filmmaker and film scholar in Asian American, Film and Media, and Feminist Studies at UCSB. Her areas of expertise are in Film and Performance Theory and Production, Social Theories of Power and Inequality, Race and Sexuality Studies, Transnational Feminisms and Asian American Cultural Studies.
Her first book THE HYPERSEXUALITY OF RACE recently won the Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. In it, she analyzes hypersexual representations of Asian/ American women in various media including industry and independent film, pornography and feminist video. Her latest film THE FACT OF ASIAN WOMEN (2002) won four inter/national festival awards. She has recently completed BIRTHRIGHT, her fifth experimental ethnographic film, about mothering across difference, and conducting archival research on her next book project Straitjacket Sex Scenes: Screening Race and Heteronormativity.
She received her B.A. in Ethnic Studies from U.C. Berkeley, her MFA in Film Directing and Production from UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television and her PhD from Stanford University in Modern Thought and Literature. |
