Paolo Patruno

BIRTH IS A DREAM

Short synopsis

Safe maternal and reproductive health, rarely-discussed human right issues, should be really a human right for every women: no women should die giving birth. That's why since 2011 I'm running my long term ongoing documentary project "BIRTH IS A DREAM" which aims to document and raise awareness about the Maternity crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa,

Long written reflection

Maternal mortality, maternal and newborn health is an untold matter.

Women die every day in a silent war.

Safe maternal and reproductive health, rarely-discussed human right issues, should be really a human right for every women: no women should die giving birth. That's why since 2011 I'm running my long term ongoing documentary project "BIRTH IS A DREAM" which aims to document and raise awareness about the Maternity crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa, I've already shot across Cameroon, DRC, Ethiopia, Malawi, Morocco, Mozambique, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

Every year in Sub-Saharan Africa, 200.000 mothers die from complications of pregnancy and childbirth; and for every woman who dies, many others suffer injury, infection or disability. In Sub-Saharan Africa adequate health services are often unavailable or inaccessible, leading many women to give birth in facilities without adequate equipment and services, as well as at home without skilled providers.

A mother's death is a human tragedy - no matter where it occurs - that traumatically affects families and communities. In the case of women in Africa, the females are the ones responsible for providing food for the family and carrying out other duties of the home. This is why a mother's death makes it harder for the family to obtain the basic necessities of life left in her wake.

I started my project in Malawi, where the words for pregnancy in the local language - pakati and matenda - translate into: "between life and death" and "sick". There I met an English midwife, who practiced for nearly 14 years in Spain before relocating to Africa in order to work as a clinical midwife in the labor ward of the Bwaila Hospital in the capital, Lilongwe. She introduced and explained to me maternal health challenges in Africa.

Maternal health and maternal mortality are very complex matters. That is why "BIRTH IS A DREAM" is a long-term project. I realized it would be impossible to document and tell this story just through a single work. I am trying to use and explore many different angles to show and raise awareness about all the aspects that can and do influence and affect maternal health.

I had the opportunity to visit hospitals and health centers in rural areas, where I looked at the facilities' conditions as well as witnessed the nurses' and midwives' daily heroic efforts to save mothers and children's lives. I visited women in rural villages documenting home births. I documented child marriages and cases of early pregnancies - of girls becoming women too early - missing their childhood and adolescent years. In fact, Africa has the world's highest rate of adolescent pregnancy, a factor that affects the health, education, and earning potential of millions of African girls. I also visited the female section of a Cameroonian prison, to tell the story of maternal health behind the bars. All of these experiences showed me how complex pregnancy and childbirth are in Sub-Saharan Africa.

And in 2015 I've decided to extended my project outside Africa, to developed/industrialized countries, starting from the United States: US has the highest maternal mortality rate of any industrialized country in the world, and African-American women are at especially high risk, nearly 4 times more likely to die of pregnancy-related complications than white women.

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