Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and the Farm Midwives

This new feature-length documentary tells the story of counterculture heroine Ina May Gaskin and her spirited friends, who began delivering each others' babies in 1970, on a caravan of hippie school buses, headed to a patch of rural Tennessee land. With Ina May as their leader, the women taught themselves midwifery from the ground up, and became an integral part of a new, entirely communal, agricultural society called The Farm. The people of the Farm grew their own food, built their own houses, published their own books, and, as word of their social experiment spread, created a model of care for women and babies that changed a generations approach to childbirth. Forty years ago Ina May led the charge away from isolated hospital birthing rooms, where husbands were not allowed and mandatory forceps deliveries were the norm. Today, as nearly one third of all US babies are born via C-section, she fights to preserve her community's hard-won knowledge. With incredible access to the midwives’ archival video collection, the film not only captures the unique sisterhood at The Farm Clinic, from its heyday into the present, but shows childbirth the way most people have never seen it--unadorned, unabashed, and awe-inspiring. More about the film >>

Freedom for Birth - short (15 min.) version

Made by British filmmaking couple Toni Harman and Alex Wakeford, Freedom for Birth tells the story of Hungarian midwife Agnes Gereb, imprisoned for supporting women during homebirths, and the subsequent successful European Court of Human Rights case that has major implications for childbirth around the world. More about the film and One World Birth >>

The Greater Good
(3:00 pm - ICPL Meeting Room D)

The Greater Good is an award winning character-driven documentary that explores the cultural intersections where parenting meets modern medicine and individual rights collide with politics. The film offers parents, doctors and policy makers a safe space to speak openly, actively listen and learn from one another. Mixing verité footage, intimate interviews, 1950s-era government-produced movies and up-to-date TV news reporting, The Greater Good weaves together the stories of families whose lives have been forever changed by vaccination.
Watch the trailer and find out more about the film >>