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there's an unforgettable moment in Songcatcher , Maggie Greenwald's 2000 film about a university musicologist doing field work in Appalachia in 1907, when the musicologist is compelled to assist in a difficult home birth in a remote mountain cabin. Way out of her element, at first the professor attempts to flee, insisting that she has no training in this area-which is, in her experience, the province of licensed physicians. The matriarch of the mountain community-who by all appearances has been delivering babies all over the mountain for decades-demands that the professor stay and help the hemorrhaging mother push out the baby, bellowing, "DO IT, WOMAN!"
Like many movies, Songcatcher makes high drama of childbirth, portraying it as a perilous, monumentally painful event-which, many times, it is, as only those who have personally experienced difficult births can authoritatively attest. But without saying a whole lot about it, Songcatcher also makes a point that's rarely advanced in contemporary films, which is that women have been delivering one another's babies for eons, and they've managed to get the job done even under challenging circumstances with no hospital wards or men in white coats within a country mile of the successful birth.
Songcatcher doesn't make this point aggressively; this scene is simply part of the story, just as home births and nonbiomedical births have been part of the lives of women and their families from time immemorial.
Recently, I had the strange and wonderful privilege of watching a contemporary home birth film that is not explicitly about advocating home birth or dramatizing childbirth, although in its own way, it achieves both. Produced by two Central Florida studios, the Nielsens Photography & Design (www.nielsensonline.com) and Cinema Chic Films (www.cinemachicfilms.com), Born at Home is an intimate and inspiring family film.
Within a few days after it was first posted on Vimeo, Born at Home went viral, garnering more than 24,000 views on Vimeo alone in its first week online. (You can see it at http://vimeo.com/22765005.) Many of us have gotten used to the idea of superstar wedding films accruing large and disparate audiences through the magic of viral videoremote as this possibility may have seemed a few years ago. But in a way, it's even more remarkable that we find ourselves...