Not Baywatch, but babywatch – Karolina Domagalska’s emotionally charged abortion rights documentary Abortion Dream Team recently snagged the Amnesty International Poland Award Special Mention at this year’s Millennium Docs Against Gravity. The justification for its selection for the prize was its persistence in “showing the personal cost that human rights defenders bear when they take on the responsibilities of the state and the healthcare system”. Highly empirical and fiercely personal, the film showcases the work and lives of the eponymous Polish organisation (abbreviated ADT), which hosts a helpline and provides recommendations to abortion services in a country with one of Europe's strictest legal frameworks for terminating a pregnancy.

The documentary follows the four core members and founders of ADT: Justyna Wydrzyńska, who runs the helpline; Natalia Broniarczyk, the media contact and the public face of the organisation; Karolina Więckiewicz, the legal activist; and Kinga Jelińska, who now runs an NGO that ships abortion pills to Poland from the Netherlands, where she is based. We see how each member of the group, particularly those in Poland, voluntarily place targets on their backs and face extreme harassment from pro-life protestors owing to their activism. The secondary subplot of the film involves Justyna being charged as an accessory to aiding in the act of abortion, as she directly mailed pills to a pregnant woman in an abusive relationship. Over the course of the film, she must navigate the added media attention while still remaining faithful to the cause she holds dear.

Most of the feature focuses on the members’ day-to-day work, which also reveals the impact of the organisation: it claims to have sent around 50,000 abortion kits and 150,000 day-after pills to women in Poland. Using a primarily cinéma vérité style, the camera captures intimate moments in the homes of the ADT members, and documents firsthand their work and discussions. The documentary hits hardest with accounts from even pro-life individuals who come to realise the organisation’s value for Polish women when they, too, find themselves wanting an abortion in a sticky situation. With very specific examples and shocking moments that reveal the amount of verbal slander the members face (such as the use of the faces of ADT members on trucks connected with the word “murder”), Domagalaska brings the viewer face to face with what’s going on in Poland today.

International news clips and coverage of abortion protests in Warsaw further emphasise the severity of the situation in the nation. However, in a pop-cinema approach, Abortion Dream Team also includes more expressive segments, such as sequences of photoshoots, TikTok and social-media content, and a Baywatch-style clip that is meant to align their status with real-life superheroes. While cheeky and perhaps sometimes detracting from the film’s overall messaging for viewers who might disagree with the documentarian’s approach, it does lighten the tone and humanise Domagalska’s subjects.

The film’s newsworthiness essentially writes itself: in March 2023, Justyna became the first woman in Europe to be convicted for aiding with an abortion. The relevance of Domagalska’s film also cements itself in times when other films on bodily autonomy and women's rights such as Our Body [+leggi anche:
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Abortion Dream Team is a Polish-Swedish production by My Way Studio and Paprika Studios.