Nacer - Diario de maternidad
Jorge Caballero
Colombia | 2011 | 83 min
Language : Spanish
Subtitle : English
A fleeting kiss and the newborn is whisked away for a variety of routine tests. The mother lies on the birthing table, exhausted, her child still out of reach to her: the tension between medical safety and her emotional needs is palpable. Jorge Caballero spent several months filming in the public hospitals of Bogotá and created six portraits of birth there. In Nacer – Diario de maternidad, Caballero, who had just become a father himself, assumes the stance of an observer – but one whose place is consistently at the side of the mothers-to-be. Their own life circumstances are precarious: only one of the women is accompanied by her husband.
In Bagatela (2008) it was lawyers for petty criminals. This time it is physicians at whose desks the women, uniformly clad in their hospital gowns, sit to discuss their cases. The births are filmed with great respect and reveal the social reality of the event. In their actions and words the staff mirror the social hierarchies within the hospital as the institution in which society is born, but there is humanity here as well, enabled by the more moving moments in this sensitive film.
Jenny Billeter
Translation BMP Translations
