The Birth Reborn

The documentary takes birth practices as its subject and argues about high rates of caesarean section and about interventions it counts as unnecessary. According to the film the present model works against women and their babies; the work supports that case through the accounts of specialists in the field and through the research it selects. Part of the account rests on hormones released during labour and draws wide social conclusions from them; that inference is the film’s own reading rather than a medical consensus. The high rate of caesarean section in Brazil, for its part, has long been a matter of public health debate. The distance between the film’s question and the film’s answer is one the reader has to measure. Eduardo Chauvet’s ninety one minute Brazilian documentary was completed in 2013.