‘Midwives’
Manager: Lea Fehner
Artists: Khadija Kouyaté, Héloïse Janjaud, Myriem Akeddiou
Year: 2023
Premiere: 2/8/24
★★★
‘Midwives’ begins with the arrival of two newly graduated midwives to the hospital. One is more proactive. The other is insecure and has recently been dumped by her partner. It’s basically an origin story, but with the non-stop, frenetic pace that hospital-set movies or series usually have: a happy scene after a perfect birth, followed by another scene where the baby is born with problems. There’s already a conflict environment due to the lack of staff and limited resources for midwives and doctors. Because HE film Even though this is not his main purpose on paper, he does not give up criticizing the French healthcare system.
The characters are exhausted not because of the workload they have, but because they are not able to do it properly. Gradually, the story of initiation, learning and experience becomes more political, in line with other French medical films such as ‘Hippocrates’, which revolve around young residents. Another success of the style used by director Léa Fehner is the incorporation of documentary naturalism into the editing.Besides the fact that he never deviates from the matrons in almost any scene: he films without uneasiness, since the daily existence of his heroes is deeply unsettled.