Contractions2024

In the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade, “Contractions” takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic. We listen to an obstetrician and a reproductive rights activist who movingly lay out these vital issues. We watch 14 women and their male allies who witness and perform with their backs to the camera. In a state where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, they can only “speak” with the full force of their collective presence.

Festivals and Selected Screenings:

True/False Film Fest, United States (2024)
Cosmic Rays Film Festival, United States (2024)
Ann Arbor Film Festival, United States (2024)
Onion City Experimental Film Festival, United States (2024)
Prismatic Ground Film Festival, United States (2024)
Moviate Underground Film Festival, United States (2024)
Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, United States (2024)
DocumentaMadrid International Film Festival, Spain (2024)
VIENNA SHORTS International Shorts Film Festival, Austria (2024)
PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art | “Sentient Disobedients” Program, Canada (2024)
DC/DOX Film Festival, United States (2024)
Olhar de Cinema Festival Internacional de Curitiba, Brazil (2024)
Other Cinema, San Francisco (2024)
AGX Boston Film Collective, Films from the Abortion Clinic Film Collective, Boston (2024)
Women Make Waves Film Festival, Taipei, Taiwan (2024)
Mimesis Documentary Festival, Boulder, Colorado (2024)
Camden International Film Festival, (2024)
Chicago Underground Film Festival, (2024)
Dialogues Documentary Festival, Milwaukee, WS (2024)

“A couple of years after the annulment of the ruling known as Roe v. Wade, which, since 1973,

guaranteed the right to abortion in the United States, weeds are growing on the walls of an empty clinic in Memphis, Tennessee. In this abandoned setting, a group of women, some holding hands with their companions, seem to recreate a kind of off-screen abortion: the entrance and exit of the clinic. We do not see their faces, but the sound guides us: in the voices of two women we hear the testimonies of those who once exercised a right, now lost.”

- Karina Solórzano, Documenta Madrid

“The cast’s gestures enact trauma, nerves, and capriciousness in doing something once legally acceptable that is now the opposite. They carry a history where their reproduction rights are currently in paralysis.” - Dispatches from True/False, The Brooklyn Rail, Edward Frumkin