Birth Time: The Documentary

Birth Time is the result of three women – Jo Hunter, Jerusha Sutton and actress Zoe Naylor – coming together through a birth, and afterwards taking a deep dive in to what birth looks like for women in the developed world, asking the question, “What would it take for women to emerge from their births physically well, and emotionally safe?”

The film opens with the story of actress, activist & producer Zoe Naylor’s birth of her second child, Beau. With Jo Hunter as her midwife, Jerusha Sutton as her doula/birth videographer and with her partner, Aaron Jeffery by her side, Zoe emerges feeling transformed and with a deep sense of healing; a vastly different experience to her first birth. This experience led to the three women having conversations about why 1 in 3 women in the developed world emerge from their births with birth trauma, why intervention and caesarean rates are rapidly increasing and why we have a postnatal depression epidemic.

We hear the traumatised birth stories of various women and their partners – giving us an insight into what women experience during the births of their babies. Global experts back up these experiences, questioning how and why our broken system fails women, their partners and the caregivers working within it. Multi-award winning actor, Aaron Jeffery, provides a significant contribution to his partner’s conversation, having traversed the birthing experience across three different settings.

Yumi Takahashi and Melanie Podolski are two pregnant women whose stories we follow throughout the film. Both women have experienced traumatic births in the past and we follow them through their pregnancy and birth journeys, having made different choices this time.

The film also profiles Mel Briggs and Cherisse Buzzacott, co-chairs of Birthing on Country: a project committed to bringing culturally sensitive care to pregnant and birthing Indigenous women. We visit the hometowns of these two inspiring indigenous midwives to learn more about the project, and the stories that brought them to be in the positions they are in. We speak with women, men, midwives, obstetricians, professors and lawyers and explore themes influencing our maternity system across the developed world, including; money, the system, human rights, the patriarchy and feminism, building a picture of the history that led us to where we are, the current culture of how the system in the modern world operates.

Explore the movement at www.birthtime.world