Video: Contractions

In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ended a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion in the United States. “Contractions” takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic. We listen to an obstetrician and a reproductive rights activist who movingly lay out these vital issues. We watch 14 women and their male allies who witness and perform with their backs to the camera. In a place where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, they “speak” with the full force of their collective presence.

Running time: 12 minutes

Performers: SaBrenna Boggan, Chase Colling, Shana J. Crispin, Kimberly Hooper-Taylor, Coe Lapossy, A. Lloyd, Audrey May, Vanessa Mejia, Natalie Richmond, Krista Scott, Neal Trotter, J. Wright, Nubia Yasin

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Edward Frumkin of Brooklyn Rail writes:

In Lynn Sachs’s Contractions, shot on the first anniversary of the reversal of Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2023, in Sachs’s hometown, Memphis, a driver named Jane and gynecologist Dr. Kimberly Looney narrate the intense experiences of getting people abortions in states with legal facilities (Illinois, for example). We see opaque pairs of pregnant people and their escorts (all actors) line up and slowly enter the building. The cast’s gestures enact trauma, nerves, and capriciousness in doing something once legally acceptable that is now the opposite. They carry a history where their reproduction rights are currently in paralysis.

Motifs of open and closed spaces once liberating for pregnant people are refined into barriers that prevent them from fulfilling their wishes. Due to the fact they made the film in Tennessee, a place where they could get arrested, Sachs and her producers, Emily Berisso and Laura Goodman, said in their Q&A that they enlisted security to protect them from prosecution, which elevates Sachs’s heedful balance of spreading enough sobbing information and protecting her sources simultaneously. Unbeknownst to the rest of the team, Berisso assembled thirteen additional volunteer marshals and a medic in this labor of love. Recalling the ending of BlacKKKlansman (2018), snippets of the blue sky become black and white as we head into the upside down.