Savanah Leaf’s A24 debut spotlights the realities of Black motherhood

Savanah Leaf’s tender debut Earth Mama begins with a woman delivering a monologue direct to the camera. “It’s my journey; it’s nobody else’s journey. Nobody is going to walk with these shoes I got on my feet. You can’t walk in my shoes but you can walk besides me,” she says. These first lines sit at the core of Leaf’s directorial ethos – a kind of cinema that does not intrude or pander to a pitiful kind of empathy, but instead observes without judgement.

Set in Oakland, Earth Mama follows Gia, a young Black mother who is struggling to reclaim custody of her kids from the foster care system while pregnant with her third child. As the camera zooms out of the first scene, we learn that the women testifying are from a reunification program for mothers trying to win their kids back from the state. Under this shared therapeutic practice lies a sense of punitive surveillance, as caseworkers keenly observe them in the back of the room. Gia refuses to stand and speak, a silent act of defiance as she repudiates a system of hyper-surveillance that punishes Black mothers. 

Although Gia is repeatedly told that she should try to make the ‘right’ choices to get her children back, she is faced with a system that constantly denies her space to choose. She can never seem to meet the demands of her case worker who chastises her for being behind on child-support payments, even though she explains she can’t take on more work hours due to the reunification program’s time demands. Leaf points towards an impossible system, one that seems to be rigged firmly against Black women. Reading with her son and daughter during visitation, Gia tries to care for them with the limited time they share together – hugging them and promising that she’ll bring them back home soon. At the same time, Gia needs to decide whether she can support her incoming child by herself again, or whether she should seek out adoption services.

Despite the heavy emotional centre of the film, Leaf’s sensitive approach refuses to judge or vindicate any of the characters, or paint Gia’s milieu in a dark light. Instead, Leaf asserts the beauty of Gia’s world, from the streets of Oakland to Gia’s dream-like sequences in expansive redwood forests. The cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes shot the film in warm 16mm, focusing on the inner worlds gleaned across character’s faces – from Gia’s inquisitive and guarded gaze, to the myriad non-professional actors, young men and women, who testify to the camera about their relationships with their mothers.

Ahead of the release of Earth Mama, we spoke to Savanah Leaf about her powerful debut, from collaborating with Kelsey Lu on the score to the symbolism of redwood trees. 

How did you make the transition from being an Olympic sportsperson to a filmmaker?

Savanah Leaf: I was a volleyball player, that’s what I did every day, eight hours a day. I got injured when I was in Puerto Rico and it forced me to figure out what I’m going to do next and what I’m going to do in my next career. I realised in sports my voice was quite dampened and I didn’t have a creative outlet. Then, I started to go into music video production, and handed out my CV to different production companies until I got hired.

I think playing sports and being on set is similar in some ways. The intuitiveness of being on court and responding in the moment where your body just responds and your mind catches up is like being on set – actors responding in the moment. In a weird way, the environment of being on a team and working on a court is similar in the kind of intuition you have to lean on.

Why did you want to make a film about Black motherhood? 

Savanah Leaf: This film has been sitting with me for a long time. From my own life, I was thinking a lot about my sister’s relationship with her birth mum; I was thinking about what it’s like to be a child yearning to understand the parent that’s not there and what that feels like. On a wider scale, I wanted to explore how Black women have historically been mothering not only our own children but everybody else’s children as well – in America, Black women were mothering slave-owners’ children. Many books and films about Black women’s experiences often depict the difficulty of being a Black mother. Before making the feature, I made the documentary short The Heart Still Hums with Taylor Russell which served as a kind of emotional research for the film and for the feelings it holds.

I wanted to show the weight of Gia’s expectations as a mother – trying to be strong and fit all her love and parenting her own children in the hour she’s permitted during visitations, and when she isn’t mothering her own children, she’s mothering her friends and her community – a care that the system does not see. We see that Gia feels the weight of it, yet she can’t walk away from it either.

Your film has a documentary-like quality with these interview-like set-ups of different mothers giving accounts of their experiences. Why did you want to include these vignettes?

Savanah Leaf: While writing, I really wanted to leave space for potentially having cast members and mother’s groups from similar circumstances. We met some of them through Bay Area organisations specifically for mothers dealing with children in foster care. Although I scripted a fair amount of these moments, we asked people to choose certain lines they resonated with, and oftentimes, people would continue telling their whole story, and it was just about us listening, and this whole group of mothers listening. I wanted to explore this link between being a mother, and their own relationship with their mothers. There’s generations of trauma that we want to shield our children from, yet we see these mothers express their doubts and their difficulties in protecting their children, and that’s really powerful.

The beginning sequence was really important for me. It is completely unscripted, it’s just Tiffany Garner telling her story. Her line: “You can’t walk in my shoes, but you can walk beside me,” is so powerful, not only in how we interact with people, but how we think about cinema and how our spectatorship. It’s about seeing someone without judgement.

I love how it’s an empathy not based on this saviour complex of rescuing someone, but it’s more about being with and listening and knowing the limits of our spectatorship. I love how we focus on Gia’s present moment too, without giving her a backstory.

Savanah Leaf: I wrote many versions where Gia talks about her backstory, who the father is, and I felt like I was trying to justify why we should care about her, which didn’t make sense. I shouldn’t have to justify it; we should be able to walk beside her and care. With the backstory, it felt like we were telling the audience what to see and feel. What I love about books is that you’re just looking at words on a page and you see these people’s inner lives, and when you leave out these details, you give the audience the space to create their own. I wanted to give my audience space to create their own details and to have faith in Gia as she is.

The film focuses a lot on the surveillance that Gia is put under – whether it be state-enforced classes, to doing a urine sample under supervision, or even her ultrasound visit where she is accompanied by a potential adoptive mother and her caseworker. Can you tell me a bit about this sense of constant surveillance?

Savanah Leaf: Surveillance is a really important word. The system she’s in is a policing system. I wanted to show how Gia is being watched and observed so that she doesn’t step out of line. That also forms part of her personality. She knows she’s being watched so she keeps a lot of her emotions inside. She doesn’t want to yell, or get too angry or throw things or cry or do anything that might show that she’s not fit to parent. She keeps it inside and tries to show this tough shield, yet we see how difficult that is.

There can be a struggle with filmmaking heightening a sense of surveillance, how did you negotiate the cinematic gaze?

Savanah Leaf: My cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes is really talented and  we worked out how to create this cinematic language together. Oftentimes we would shoot only one angle in a scene. That would allow a lot of the new, non-professional actors to only do the scene once – they only had to do it one really good time, they didn’t have to repeat themselves. It allows you to stay in the present moment. We used these long dolly shots to film Gia, where we see and experience her life with her, besides her as she’s experiencing it, without any sharp cuts to ensure that we are not forcing anything on the viewer. 

I really liked that element of it. Even though we used many closeup shots of the characters, the camera itself is quite far away, maintaining a distance to respect our actors feeling all these emotions, and not intruding on it. We wanted to allow people to sit in those spaces and emotions in a way that’s observing the action rather than forcing action.

Because the film itself is really heavy, I wanted the cinematography to be light – embracing the warmth of daylight, of showing the beauty of the community coming together. It doesn’t have to be full of trauma and darkness! Instead, I wanted to show the softness and the love I have for all these people, and hope people come away from the film feeling that same love.

Although the film is grounded in realism, you introduce these dreamlike sequences in the forest with Gia surrounded by trees and by earth. How did this natural element come into the film?

Savanah Leaf: I was leaning into the contrast between the state of being pregnant – this alien thing moving inside of you, but also this very natural thing. A lot of mothers have done this. It’s this very physical thing. I wanted to contrast the natural world of freedom and connection with the cold spaces that she’s supposed to mother her children. 

When Gia is surrounded by this natural world, she is surrounded by the shared root connections between the redwood trees and their lineage. Redwoods live in communities and their roots communicate with each other underground. It’s like, look at this lineage and history of black motherhood – of inheriting this pain and struggle, but also inheriting this beauty and power.

When Gia’s umbilical cord turns into an earthy root that she pulls out, I wanted to consider how strange it is that suddenly, you’re properly detached from your child. How symbolic is that and how painful is that?

The score by Kelsey Lu adds to this natural element, with her cello and the atmosphere it builds. How did you work with Lu to create this mood?

Savanah Leaf: When I met Lu, she resonated with the emotions behind the script. She came on board after the editing process and she created a composition that was based on the inner world of Gia by responding to what she saw on screen. She created this kind of hum, this longing in her music that I think is really important. She made this first composition with her cello and little flutters of heartbeats. She got her long-time friends and collaborators to improvise over scenes – Moses Boyd, the harpist Brandee Younger and other wonderful instrumentalists. The music arose as a conversation with the images.

Which filmmakers resonated with you while making Earth Mama?

Savanah Leaf: I watched a lot of the Dardenne Brothers film and I resonated with how they stay in the present moment. Their film The Sun really inspired me. Michael Heneke also moved me, looking at how his films often leave you sitting in one shot. Recently, I watched Alice Diop’s Saint Omer which I loved. The way she explores spectatorship and black motherhood is really powerful and I hope we continue to explore these complex representations of black women.

Earth Mama releases in UK cinemas on December 8, 2023