Eleven years ago Savanah Leaf competed at the London games as a member of Team GB’s first ever Olympic volleyball team. But to hear the London-born, Oakland-raised film-maker tell it now, that was nothing compared to the pressure of making her first feature film. “It was really tough,” she says to the Guardian. “At times I was looking around like, damn, how are we going to finish today?”
That A24-stamped indie – Earth Mama – hits US theaters this weekend after a warm reception at the Sundance Film Festival. And, well, “tough” is definitely one way to sum up this 100-minute heart render. Another: Gia, a pregnant single mother, is straining to recover from past drug use and the two small children put in foster care as a result, and barely has strength remaining to keep pushing.
Gia is bogged down inside a crappy apartment with her call-girl sister, stuck working a soul-crushing job at a mall portrait studio staging portraits with newborns and young moms. She has to endure case workers giving her a hard time about being late to supervised visitations, and for not sacrificing enough time to participate in reunification programs. She seems fated to end up like too many Black woman left to fend for themselves in Oakland’s concrete jungle. And yet she keeps going. “She’s definitely an Olympian, too” says Tia Nomore, who plays Gia. “A street Olympian. Shorty is jumpin’ through hoops, OK? She’s absolutely persevering.”
Earth Mama takes A24 open-pore film-making style to the hilt. Brightness and color are flattened. Dialogue is spare. Closeups are extreme and oblique. All of it builds on the stark tone Leaf established in her debut short The Heart Still Hums – a documentary about five women fighting to win back their children and overcome a cycle of homelessness, drug addiction and neglect.
Leaf, who wrote and directed Earth Mama, took some inspiration from those stories and pulled the rest from a longstanding curiosity about her sister, a foster care survivor. “It’s kind of my imagination of what her birth mother was going through when she gave her child up for adoption,” Leaf says. The documentary became the “emotional research” that forced her to explore bigger ideas – what it means to be a “fit” parent, and who are the bureaucrats who get to decide. Leaf considered expanding on her documentary short, “but I didn’t want to follow mothers around and potentially impact whether they were going to get their kids back from the foster care system,” she adds. “Making this fictionalized story was potentially more truthful in that I could say things that people are too uncomfortable to state.”
Throughout, Earth Mama remains stubbornly true to 2010s Oakland – from the detachable in-car stereo receivers to the dawn of the Golden State Warriors NBA dynasty. “The Bay is so specific, though” Leaf says, “from the clothes to the music. At this time we’re talking about, it felt like a cocoon of art and creativity. It really holds on to culture and community in a way that I don’t think you get in every place in the world.”
Nomore, an Oakland rapper making her screen acting entrance, was at the heart of Earth Mama’s authenticity. In addition to walking the talk, she came to the role of Tia as a new mom and certified doula by Black women to treat Black women. “I don’t think people understand how incredibly scary it is to make the decision to have a baby as Black woman in this lifetime right now,” says Nomore, nodding at the staggering rate of maternal mortality in that cohort. “It’s incredibly heavy. And then to do something like this film too was just like, Wow.”
Too often, Nomore found her work on Earth Mama cutting to the bone. It was bad enough only getting peeks at a sleeping baby between long days away from home. A crying infant actor could have her lactating on the spot. Not being able to give the baby that milk would just make matters worse. “I have a hard time accepting people saying, ‘Great performance,’” says Nomore, who doesn’t look much like a rookie carrying this maiden feature. “I was quite literally just living, and Savanah was just great at capturing me experiencing things.”
On occasion, Earth Mama digresses into magical realism, and Gia seizes on those opportunities to escape into real nature where she can stand as proud and unbidden as a redwood. But playing those moments wasn’t especially freeing for Nomore. Mostly, she was beset by her own more inward-driven emotional research, not least her method insistence on wearing her pregnant belly off set. Anytime Nomore sought to push the envelope, she risked massive setbacks to her mental health.
It’s why Earth Mama still feels like a split-body experience to her even now. “It felt like the past, present and future,” she says. “But when I was home, I could lay in my own bed with Tia and Gia beside each other and my kid. Sometimes I would imagine Gia’s place of peace being my actual life. You have this wonderful kid that nobody can get in between you and her. And she has this great, wonderful dad that is, like, your best friend from day one. I gave so much release to Gia by being Tia at the end of the day.”
Leaf, too, wrestled with self-doubt. When deeper explorations of Earth Mama’s heavy material wasn’t leaving her nerves in tatters, imposter syndrome was rearing its ugly head. She might beat herself up about not locking down a shooting location until her cinematographer said, Happens all the time. “But I’m really thinking I fucked up,” Leaf says.
What’s more, many of the film-makers on Earth Mama were first-timers apart from Jason’s Lyric’s Bokeem Woodbine, Earth Mama’s male ballast; and Living Single’s Erika Alexander, the foster care liaison who became something of an earth mama on set. “She really was like the mother of all mothers – came early, stayed late and just talked to people to hear their stories,” Leaf says. “She also had this ability to step back and other people guide her – which I think was one of the beauties in this. She could’ve easily come in and [dictated terms], left the set and not talked to any of the [actor] mothers, not spoken to Tia off-camera.”
“There were so many times when I’d pull up to Miss Erika just straight spiraling, like, ‘Please just rub my head. I need a mom,’” says Nomore, still smarting from the emotional rollercoaster that filming put her through. “It was really hard for everybody to watch. Even when I was on script, the sound guys were hearing me crying in the bathroom, like Tia, you can do this.”
The film she and Leaf have midwifed is raw and unflinching – a genuinely tough watch that draws to an anxious conclusion. But that doesn’t make the issues raised in Earth Mama any less urgent and worthy of attention. “All these people around Gia try and help in some way,” Nomore says. “Sometimes it hurts, but it’s all the people she’s left with. I think it’s important to reflect that community.”