How To Have an American Baby (2023, directed by Leslie Tai) takes a long look at the practice of Chinese tourism to the United States in order to give birth to children on American soil, thus granting the children citizenship. This is facilitated by so-called "maternity hotels" who host the mothers while they wait out the last three or four months of their pregnancies. These facilities are sometimes apartment buildings, sometimes residential houses, which the services own and rent to their customers for a premium. They also arrange health care. There is a booming economy in birth tourism on the West Coast. As you might guess, certain kinds of American citizens have their panties in a twist over this, though for entirely wrong reasons.
The film itself follows two women through the process, and spends some time getting to know a couple who are the proprietors of one such service. The stories of the two women are in parallel to the point where they give birth on the same day, with very different outcomes. One woman has a healthy baby after a very difficult delivery, the other's delivery ends in tragedy as the baby suffers a brain hemorrhage and dies. We watch the birth of the healthy baby, while in the background we hear the nurses reacting to something going very wrong with the other birth. This is only half the story, though. Lele, the woman whose baby dies, is convinced that malpractice was the actual cause. There is some foreshadowing of this in the conversations the various women have in the long run up to the births. They speculate on which hospital is best for delivery and gossip about a baby dying at one of the hospitals on offer. The downside of Lele's position, though, is that she only speaks Mandarin, and cannot advocate for herself. The staff of the maternity hospital give her the cold shoulder. Eventually, she goes back to China to resume her life as the mistress of a party official who didn't really want a baby in the first place. The healthy baby, Sam, goes home with his mother who ponders staying in the United States to give the child an American education. The owners of the maternity hotel divorce and dissolve their business and return to China to pursue other opportunities. In the background, early, is a community action committee who are keeping an eye out for illegal mothers and their "anchor babies." It's a knotty, complex set of issues, presented in an observational fashion without comment from the filmmakers, whose point of view--assuming there is one--is elided by their editing choices.
There's a line in one of the songs on Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad in reference to the immigrant experience from the point of view of undocumented Mexicans that says "For everything the North gives/It ask twice in return." This was in my head as I watched How To Have an American Baby, because all of these women and even the proprietors pay a heavy cost for their version of the American dream. All of this is done without insurance protection or even basic redress of the law in case something goes wrong and it generally project into broader issues of race, immigration, class, economics, and America's know-nothing political wing. The structure of the film is careful to introduce us to all of its subjects--except maybe this film's committee of Karens--as human beings, with hopes for their children and for themselves. This is what good documentaries do: they find the universal in the specific. When we follow a gaggle of expectant mothers to the beach and listen to them talk about what to expect, that could be any group of women. When one of the women decides to bungee jump from high platform at the beach amusement park, it delineates the characters of these women based on who would and wouldn't choose to take such a risk. Even the owners of the maternity hotel seem less less like predators and more like desperate people caught in capitalism's machinery of exploitation.
The relative absence of fathers in the film--they generally don't accompany their partners to the US, turns into a critique of cowardly manhood as the film goes on ending with the hotel's female owner being blindsided by a fait acompli divorce upon return to Beijing, while Lele's partner is given a monologue near the end of the film in which he has just enough rope to hang himself. Not all of the men in this film are awful, which is good, but as they say, enough men are.
This is what's known as a blackout film: which is to say that it is structured around a series of vignettes separated by fade-to-black transitions. The film's editing favors long takes, which in concert with its transitional preferences tends to make the film feel long, even accounting for the fact that it plays right at two hours. There's a lot here to incite an audience to become enraged at what they're watching, and maybe the filmmakers are right to slow things down and take a long look at the people on screen. But in doing so, they remove a level of urgency to a movie that maybe ought to have a bit more rage in it's DNA. Sometimes villains are actually villains.
This year's True Vision award winner at the festival was director Victoria Linares Villegas and in her honor, True/False screened her new film, Ramona (2023), a film that exists in that liminal space between truth and fiction that the festival values so much. It's a metacinematic portrait of the filmmaking process that exposes social fissures between the haves and have-nots, and between men and women. The plot of the Ramona centers around actress Camila Santana, who is preparing to play the role of a teen mother in the director's next production (in the Q & A after the film, the director mentioned that the film within the film is inspired by Faulkner's Light in August, for what it's worth). Camila isn't satisfied with her character and says so as she's being fitted for a pregnancy belly. She would like to meet girls like the one who she is preparing to portray. The director agrees, and the two of them set out into the lower-class areas of the Dominican Republic to interview various women about their experiences as either currently pregnant teens, or as mothers who gave birth as teens. This brings both director and actress smack up against their own privileges to the point where they begin staging scenes from their prospective film with the girls they are meeting in the characters' roles rather than the professional actors they started with. The process dissolves into the film and both Villegas and Camila vanish, having ceded the screen to the women they've interviewed.
There are two scenes in Ramona that seem to summarize its overall revelation: in the first we see Camila making herself some coffee in her home kitchen, which is very much appointed with appliances and interior design. In a different scene, we see Camila making spaghetti with the family of one of the girls she's researching. They live out in the country and their kitchen is open air with battered pots. The difference in affluence is stark between these scenes. In another scene, we see Camila swimming with some of the girls. She's wearing a sleek designer swimsuit and is conspicuously not pregnant, while the girls swim in whatever they were wearing at the time. Given the trickster nature of this film, it's almost certain that this was all calculated for effect. Also calculated for effect are scenes of Camila, a trained actress, rehearsing the part of Ramona, and the part as played by several of the girls at the end of the film. A lot of neo-realist directors like untrained actors for their authenticity with varying results, but this film is not a neo-realist film and it manages the trick nicely. There is an artifice in Camila's performance of these scenes (deliberately, one assumes), and an unforced naturalism in the scenes staged later.
Under all its self-reflection, there's a striking critique of pregnancy as an instrument of patriarchy. All of the women Camila and Victoria interview have seen their horizons shrink because they became mothers so young. Whether it's educational, economic, or interpersonal, they have all been diminished by the actions of men. The film pointedly keeps men at a distance. We see a group of young men playing in a fountain at one point without a care in the world. They stay boys even after becoming fathers. The girls, on the other hand, are asked point blank where the dividing line between "girl" and "woman" is. No definite answer to this question is provided, but it hangs in the negative space. The girls have their own ideas about men when they direct Camila in a scene depicting a barroom counter with a guy hustling her for sex, and every one of them tell her to take his money and run. It's not all bad for men, though. Camila dances with a man at a street festival and there's joy in both dancers, although the specter of sex is always there in dance.
When the film inevitably bleeds into the film within a film it turns into a melodrama about liberation, following the character they've been researching on an Odyssey to escape her horrible homelife and make it in a movie production that seems very far away. Instead she encounters a woman in a bad marriage who helps her over the protests of an abusive husband. When they steal his motorbike and head to the sea, there's a catharsis on the face of both women. It's a nice fantasy, one where the design elements of fiction filmmaking take over to produce emotional moods. It's a striking transformation for a film that has mostly been fiction to start with hiding behind the documentary facade.
As a final note: About halfway through the film I realized that the woman sitting next to me to my left was Camila Santana herself. Watching her on screen while sitting next to her made an already meta film experience even more deeply weird.
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