After Birth
A new commissioned essay by Sophia Satchell-Baeza
It starts in darkness. Heavy panting, muffled voices, a savage animal wail. In the opening moments of Josephine Ahnelt’s Waves Turn (2025), we hear – but crucially, do not see – a child being born. The black frame withholds a sight that has long fascinated experimental and independent filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Robert Kramer, Marjorie Keller or Janis Crystal Lipzin since at least the 1950s. Representations of childbirth in cinema often entail a moment of physical and psychic rupture; of gory, transgressive affect. In Ahnelt’s intimate observational documentary, it is rather the slow-burn, transformative impact of parenthood – particularly those tear-soaked, milk-sodden early days – that becomes the film’s subject matter. The first year of parenthood is typically characterised by a retreat into the domestic and the elaborate rituals of care. Waves Turn makes visible the quiet intimacies – and economics – implicit in maternal nurture. After the ecstasy, the laundry.
Ahnelt’s first feature patiently follows five women across a single year, showing each engaged in the everyday work of loving and caring for their baby. The film’s rhythms follow those of everyday life. The camera hugs close to bodies in extreme close-up and rocks gently to the sounds of a lullaby sung to regulate nerves. It gets close to the ground and into bed, maintaining a level footing with its protagonists through a positionality that never feels intrusive. Deeply committed to analogue filmmaking practices, Ahnelt shot Waves Turn on Super 16mm film and the warm, grainy textures of the film stock echo in repeated imagery of tactility and touch. The film dwells in the poetry of intimate gestures that accumulate gently, caught in the flicker of early-morning light: a baby’s fist curled around an index finger or the long, gentle stroke of a tummy. But hands busy themselves in other ways too: with the labour of nursing, folding, cooking, washing, soothing, drying, and packing away. Work is never too far from love: one is an expression of the other – however complicated that entanglement might be.
While there is no one experience of mothering, there are common battlegrounds that continue to be fought over, many decades after second-wave feminism and the civil rights movement helped give a voice to these struggles. Women speak of the pressures of femininity and the unattainable ideals of motherhood, of postpartum depression and the struggle to breastfeed, workplace sexism and the struggles of early maternal attachment. Art offers one way of making sense of personal transformation: one of the mothers, artist Judith Rohrmoser, paints herself breastfeeding with headphones on, as she stares defiantly at the camera. In Acts of Creation (2024), art critic Hettie Judah describes how self-portraiture of mothers ‘offers a process of thinking through making, a way to get to grips with the shifting “I”.’
The one-year milestone becomes a subtle organising principle, allowing the women to reflect on time past and the impact of this fundamental, atom-level change. Art about motherhood often uses time as a constraint and as catalyst: Bernadette Mayer wrote The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994) during the nine months of her pregnancy, while Ariana Harwicz wrote Die, My Love (2012) in between feeds. This has a lot to do with how motherhood is measured in increments of time: not just the time of gestation, a period often characterised by painfully slow waiting, but the time-out-of-time implicit in the duties of care, when one’s hours are ruled by another and subject to rigid routines of napping and feeding. Time slows down but can also speed up: one of the women in the film protests of being ‘always behind, trying to adapt.’
Ahnelt portrays the intimacy of family life and the speed of a child’s development as a series of moments that are evanescent and difficult to grasp. Film, of course, freezes and makes concrete what might otherwise become blurry. Parenting appears as an atomised experience often lopped off from a wider community. That well-known African proverb that it takes a village to bring up a child has been largely jettisoned by the neoliberal recasting of the nuclear couple as a retrogressive throwback to 1950s domesticity. We are reminded of this when a couple speaks of the struggle to make ends meet, citing rising childcare costs: it’s cheaper for the mother to stay home. Another mother tells of staying home because she struggles to feed in public, becoming dependent on people visiting her. In the film’s final moments, this anxiety is upturned. Many of the women come together in the park. They take up space outdoors, and they dance. Babies are strapped to their chest, and the grass is under their feet.
Sophia Satchell-Baeza is a writer, editor and film curator.
