Labor of Love: Filmmaker Savanah Leaf on the Intimate Power of ‘Earth Mama’

That much is clear from the very first scene, when a woman, facing the camera, hands in her pockets, speaks in a support group for mothers like Gia. “It’s my journey; it’s nobody else’s journey. Nobody is going to walk with these shoes I got on my feet,” she says. “You can hold my hand, you can look back from a distance. You still won’t feel what I feel.” This is Tiffany Garner, who also appeared in The Heart Still Hums. “I’m sitting right by the camera, and she’s speaking to me, and it’s very powerful,” Leaf says. Here, as in other moments in the film, what began as scripted dialogue turned into the actor’s own words. These ones in particular reverberate throughout Earth Mama: Leaf’s work invites viewers to walk alongside her characters, observing unique portraits of motherhood.

There’s a moment in the film when Gia’s friend calls her “mama,” and Gia snaps back, “I am not your mama.” I ask Leaf, who is not a mother herself, how this moment, this word, resonates with her. “My sister’s daycare teachers call the little girls ‘mama’ or a friend will look at me and call me ‘mama.’ I pass by people on the streets and they’re hollering at me, and they call me ‘mama,’” she says. “I was thinking about how we get called ‘mama’ in all these different contexts, especially Black women, and how that can be a really beautiful, empowering thing. There’s a warmth to the word. It’s what you say as a child. And then, there’s also this haunting pressure to be a mother, especially for Black women. Throughout history, they haven’t just been mothering their own children. They’ve been mothering everybody else’s children as well.”

All throughout Earth Mama, Gia is faced with inflection points: whether to ask for an advance at work, whether to stay sober, whether to speak up at her court-mandated support group, whether to give up her baby. At one point, in front of her social worker and prospective adoptive mother, she backs away completely. No amount of close-ups or testimonials will put us in her place—in any character’s place, for that matter—but that’s the point. We can only hold her hand from the other side of the screen. “It challenges the audience to go on this journey,” Leaf says. “Can you stick with it?”