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BERLINALE 2023 Panorama

Review: Midwives

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- BERLINALE 2023: Léa Fehner’s fiction film thrusts two young newly qualified midwives into the chaos of a profession under pressure and treading a very fine line between joy and tragedy

Review: Midwives
Khadija Kouyaté in Midwives

"There are always problems. Welcome to the French state hospital! But we’re a team". What profession could be more worthy on paper than one which helps women give birth, but which also involves huge responsibilities and shared emotions needing to be channelled in a very precariously balanced hospital environment, on account of the years-long financial prioritisation of just-in-time management. "If we keep on accepting everything, we’re going to lose a baby". Throwing herself into a fiction film on the subject, from the angle of the tricky integration and initiation of two young newcomers to the profession, French filmmaker Léa Fehner (very well-received via her two previous opuses Silent Voices [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Qu'un seul tienne et les au…
film profile
]
and Ogres [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
]
) makes no secret of her engagement and deep concern in her incredibly dynamic movie Midwives [+see also:
trailer
interview: Léa Fehner
film profile
]
, which was presented in the 73rd Berlinale's Panorama line-up, and is the second instalment (after Guillaume Brac’s All Hands on Deck [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Guillaume Brac
film profile
]
) in a collection of films made for Arte and starring students in their last year at Paris’s Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique.

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"It’ll be ok. We can do it". In the hospital entrance, two friends Sofia (Khadija Kouyaté) and Louise (Héloïse Janjaud) encourage and reassure one another. After five years of studying, it’s their big day, the first of their professional lives as midwives. They’re greeted by a whirlwind, a lightning-speed tour of their department, reprimands from long-timers ("if you can’t remember what I’m telling you, you’re going to struggle", "what’s with the emotional outburst? Leave your moods in the locker room. We’re at level three of the most serious illnesses. You’re going to make things hard for us"). From one labour to another, stage by stage, from the adrenaline and collective happiness of “easy” births to errors of judgement (Sofia doesn’t pick up on a uterine rupture and the baby only just survives: "we’ve got hearts, let’s just hope our brains aren’t too battered") causing a vicious circle of stress and doubt ("we can’t save everyone") which interferes with work, from the management of intrusive future grandmothers to the distress of sending migrants and their newborns back onto the streets, and from digital debriefs to departmental parties, the understaffed maternity team manage to keep things afloat. But how long can they carry on bending before they break?

With her eyes wide open to the reality, intensity and composure required in this profession, which operates so closely to the sources of life (though when we say life, we mean death hovers too), the director (who wrote the screenplay with Catherine Paillé) mobilises her dynamism and cuts to the chase within the limits imposed by the hospital film genre (confined spaces, nigh-on documentarian respect for the activities and atmosphere of the medical world), all the while injecting the movie with a degree of humour so as to avoid an excess of emotion and drama. Not everything is perfect in this highly sympathetic blend, which tries to capture vast individual and collective complexity through the narrow end of a funnel. But, as we follow the progressive loss of innocence of Fehner’s two young protagonists and their growing professionalism, the director successfully conveys her message, denouncing working conditions in French maternity wards which are fast reaching breaking point.

Midwives is produced by Geko Films for Arte France, with sales entrusted to Pyramide International.

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(Translated from French)

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