commune

If you’ve never had bedside seats to a live birth, here’s your chance.

Raw, nostalgic, and lovingly-crafted, Sara Lamm and Mary Wigmore’s feature-length documentary, “A Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and The Farm Midwives” captures the 1970s countercultural zeitgeist of its titular band of self-taught midwives. Grainy footage depicts the early settlers of The Farm, an intentional community in Tennessee, enacting a utopian mission to “be in community, to raise children in another way, and to take care of the planet.”

Spearheading this mission is Ina May Gaskin, the film’s heroine, whose own fraught encounters with the medical establishment during her pregnancy led her to reclaim childbirth as a community-based effort. Arguing that medical knowledge does not have to be the property of a select few, Gaskin inspired a renaissance of homebirthing culture on The Farm that challenged the dominant trend of unnecessary pre-emptive C-sections and empowered mothers to be more autonomous in their own birthing processes.