Schedule

Midwives chronicles two women who run a makeshift medical clinic in a region torn apart by violent ethnic divisions. Hla, the owner, is a Buddhist in western Myanmar, where the Rohingya, a Muslim minority, are persecuted and denied basic rights. Nyo Nyo is a Muslim and an apprentice. Encouraged and challenged by Hla, Nyo Nyo is determined to become a steady health care provider for her people.

“How do you live without your mother?” Filmmaker Judith Helfand asks this unbearable question twice: as a daughter caring for her terminally ill mother, and as an “old new mom,” single parenting her much-longed-for adopted baby girl. With footage from 25 years of first-person filmmaking, shiva babka and 63 boxes of dead parents’ “stuff,” the film asks: what do we really need to leave our children?

Midwives chronicles two women who run a makeshift medical clinic in a region torn apart by violent ethnic divisions. Hla, the owner, is a Buddhist in western Myanmar, where the Rohingya, a Muslim minority, are persecuted and denied basic rights. Nyo Nyo is a Muslim and an apprentice. Encouraged and challenged by Hla, Nyo Nyo is determined to become a steady health care provider for her people.

“How do you live without your mother?” Filmmaker Judith Helfand asks this unbearable question twice: as a daughter caring for her terminally ill mother, and as an “old new mom,” single parenting her much-longed-for adopted baby girl. With footage from 25 years of first-person filmmaking, shiva babka and 63 boxes of dead parents’ “stuff,” the film asks: what do we really need to leave our children?