REVIEW: earth mama

A Hella Powerful Homage to Black Motherhood and The Bay’s Cultural Landscape

Director Savanah Leaf’s debut feature film follows a pregnant single mother pitted against the system, fighting impossible odds to reclaim her children from foster care in the Northern California Bay Area.

By Kennedy J.L. Jopson

Gia draws a pipe to her lips and sets it alight over the mound of her pregnant belly. As she inhales, she transports herself mentally to a place that symbolizes strength, resilience, and healing at a time when she feels isolated and at a loss. She sits at the center of a clearing in a Redwood Forest, native to California surrounded by a circle of earthly giants reaching up to 350 feet in the sky. This unique formation of trees is known as a “fairy ring” or a “cathedral” After being cut down, a new generation of trees sprout from the roots of the fallen redwood. Creating a near-perfect circle around the stump of the mother tree, whose widespread roots survive and heal in community, strong and intertwined.

“Imagine lowering yourself into the earth, the people around you, supporting you.”

Grammy-nominated director and former Olympian, Savanah Leaf subverts stereotypes of Black motherhood and champions the cultural landscape of the Bay Area in her intimate debut feature Earth Mama (2023). Shot against the backdrop of NorCal’s hazy ‘Indian summer’ purple sunsets and deeply forested canyons, Earth Mama takes place on sacred, indigenous land that has birthed more grassroots organizations to preserve its soil, cultural diversity, and human rights of its inhabitants arguably than any other city in the United States. Centered in Oakland, California (birthplace of the Black Panther party) a city with a rich history of resistance and civic activism, Earth Mama builds on Leaf’s award-winning documentary short, The Heart Still Hums (2020) and explores the real-life narratives of single mothers throughout Northern California. Leaf centered her film around the works and the women she met through non-profit grassroots organizations Black Mothers United/HerHealthFirst and Chicks in Crisis.

“It’s my journey; it’s nobody else’s journey. Nobody is going to walk in these shoes I got on my feet. You can’t walk in my shoes but you can walk beside me.”

Through a compassionate character study, the film follows Gia (portrayed by Oakland rapper, mother, and trained doula, Tia Nomore in her first acting role) a young mother who quietly but defiantly contends with pregnancy, addict recovery, and poverty while trying to retain some control over her life. Leaf submerges the viewer into Tia’s long days working part-time at a mall photo studio managing scenic backdrops for happier families, or at least staging the desire of such. A bleak contrast to her one-hour supervised weekly visits with her two children in foster care. Between getting by on food stamps, tiefing middle-class playgrounds for diapers, periodically dodging child protective services, and scrounging for dimes to keep up with her dwindling phone credit— stability, let alone basic necessities are hard to reach.

Confronted with the distressing possibility of permanently losing three children to the foster-care system, Gia reluctantly explores the option of having her unborn child adopted by a Black family of her choosing. This prompts her to transition from her resolute isolation to assembling a support network of women, which includes her astute social worker Miss Carmen (Erika Alexander), and affable potential girlfriend, Mel (Keta Price). The film remains impartial even as Gia’s best friend Trina (Florida rapper Doechii) chastises Gia with recitations of Bible verses to convince her to keep her baby. Trina sees adoption as a part of a system that, in her view, deprives Black women of "our culture, our homes, our freedoms, our God-given right to have our kids." This brings into question a longer arc of history that connects slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and climate violence.

Whatever preconceptions you may have about a woman in Gia’s position are likely distorted by a history of anti-Black depictions of Black women in film and other forms of media. Gia does not embody anti-Black, misogynist tropes like the mythological Sapphires, Jezebels, and Welfare Queens that have created reductive images of Black women in effort to dehumanise Black communities. Leaf purposely does not provide a backstory for Gia and creates distance between the camera and her subject to ensure no emotional visual language is imposed upon the viewer. We see Gia and her life as they are. Yeah, Gia is a young mother, she is on welfare, and she is holding herself together while dealing with a lot of shit. She wants to be a good mother and knows she doesn’t need a gold star from anyone to prove that she is. But her time and energy, and therefore personhood, are absorbed by court-mandated protocols that make it impossible for her to work more than 15 hours a week and earn enough income to afford the child-care payments the court demands. 

If it seems like the system is rigged against Gia, one can assume Leaf is suggesting we consider that these systems are not designed to protect but to derail, surveil, and harm marginalised communities. A recent study found that 53% of all Black children in the US will experience a child welfare investigation by the time they reach age 18, while one-third of children in foster care in the US are disproportionately Black. Award-winning academic Dorothy Roberts writes that the child welfare system is better understood as a ‘family policing system’ that collaborates with law enforcement to oppress marginalized communities, policing Black women’s abilities to build and sustain their families. In this way, Black women, specifically Black mothers, bear the brunt of violence that is inflicted upon Black communities and are wrongfully made to feel responsible for generations of suffering. Creating intergenerational mother wounds that stem from the sexist belief entrenched in Western  culture that anything wrong in a child's life is subsequently the fault of the mother.

In an interview with the British Blacklist, Leaf discussed having a “mother consultant” on set to support the cast. Earth Mama’s attention to mother wounds and healing is expressed through a poetic visual language between the psyche of Gia, her community (particularly the women in her life) and the natural landscape. Emmy-nominated cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes’s use of a 16mm camera richly textures and unearths the gritty layers and sublime complexities of Gia’s internal world while maintaining its distance. This visual technique creates an emphasis on how guarded Gia is and suggests what she holds inside is valuable, or sacred. Wide shots of Gia moving through her environment searching for resources and support provide an honest portrayal of the ethos of the community’s struggle contrasted by the landscape’s abundance and beauty.

Shooting almost entirely on location, the landscape is an important aspect of Earth Mama’s story. So much so, that it can be seen as a living thing or a characterized entity. Lipes manages to capture the heart and soul of the California Bay Area on film with sites such as Lake Merritt, (aka the ‘Jewel of Oakland’ and America’s oldest wildlife refuge) a watery oasis that is central to the lives of Oakland residents and community gatherings. The community’s connection to the natural landscape is so inherent that it is paralleled in urban life as well. The ring-like tread of pimped out cars’ burned rubber on Oakland’s streets at a communal sideshow function resemble the markings on the stump of a tree, indicating it’s lifespan. This is a metaphor referring to the lifeforce of a community fueled by its unique culture.

Leaf further communicates this inborn connection to the land by incorporating surrealist imagery of the umbilical cord becoming a root protruding from within. Dialogue within Earth Mama discusses how prematurely cutting this link between mother and child can induce long-term damage. Suggesting that the same can be said of indigenous communities from their homes, their land. Throughout the film, Leaf makes space for non-actors to share accounts of their personal experience in the system and the effect being separated from their families, whether in their childhood or from their children, has had on their lives. Their emotional accounts of displacement and struggle mirror Gia’s, revealing a cyclical offense experienced within her community and a deep desire to be grounded by a sense of security and belonging.

Earth Mama’s consistent symbolism suggests that Gia’s resilience is ancestral. In an interview with AfricaNews Leaf stated “[I was] thinking about roots and trees and how the Bay Area is surrounded by trees that have been around for so many generations and hold so much weight. They survive as groups, as a community, underneath the ground they actually communicate through their roots.” Despite adversity, Gia is surrounded by a network of Black women who offer their undying support in the ways they know how to and the ways they can. Still, there is a sense that these women somehow are fated to stand alone. From this tonal understanding embedded in the script, Leaf sought to express “how Black women are kind of like the center of our universe and the power held within that.” Stoic as a redwood tree, Gia’s embodiment can also be seen as petrification, as the connection between her body and mind is hardened by the fear of losing all of her children and what’s left of herself. She frequently disassociates to survive the overwhelmingly disappointing conditions of her life while her subconscious seeks refuge in daydreams.

These dreamlike depictions are enhanced by the film's score. Orchestrated by classically trained cellist and singer Kelsey Lu, whose unique fusion of jazz, blues, and folk music channeling the sounds of natural environments and fronted by Lu’s empyrean vocals creates a grounding yet, otherworldly soundscape resonating with a lineage of Black music and nature, assuring that the two belong to one another and exist in harmony.

Nuanced and honest, Earth Mama offers a unique voice and vision to contemporary cinema with its bold and unfeigned articulation of a social issue concerning the intersection of race, gender, and class. Inspiring its viewers with compassion and an encouraging message: Though the wood is petrified, it heals and lives on through the support of community.

Earth Mama had a limited UK release on December 8th 2023 with a UK online release date TBC. Film4 // A24 // Universal Pictures // We Are Parable.

Kennedy J.L. Jopson is a multimedia writer born and raised in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, and based in London, UK. She curates contemporary art and writes on the intersection of race and gender in literature, theatre, and film. Kennedy attended Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, where she studied Culture, Criticism, and Curation.