Sundance Projects Tackle Racial Disparity, Maternal-Mortality Crisis and Abortion

variety.com:

Addie Morfoot ContributorRacism and women’s rights are two timely, urgent issues that numerous directors with films at Sundance tackle via fictional or documentary films.Mariama Diallo’s “Master” and Carey Williams’ “Emergency” are two examples of narrative features heading to the fest that address the issue of race and racism in America.

While Diallo’s “Master” portrays racism in an academic setting, Williams’ “Emergency” follows a group of Black and Latino college students who weigh the pros and cons of calling the police when faced with an emergency situation.“As always, our program is a reflection of artists’ response to the times we live in,” says Kim Yutani, Sundance Film Festival’s director of programming. “We are very aware that this festival comes after a year of serious and much-needed racial reckoning in the U.S.

The work speaks to that and brings insight and nuance to this complex conversation.”Racial disparity is also examined in Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee’s documentary “Aftershock.” About the U.S.

maternal-mortality crisis, the film documents the preventable deaths of two young Black women due to childbirth complications.“At the end of 2017, ProPublica came out with their series on lost mothers — about maternal care and preventable deaths happening in the U.S.,” says Eiselt. “Then they came out with a follow-up series on the Black-white disparity in pregnancy-related mortality and that’s when I thought it was a real systemic“At the end of 2017, ProPublica came out with their series on lost mothers — about maternal care and preventable deaths happening in the U.S.,” says Eiselt.