“Earth Mama,” starring Doechii and Tia Nomore, takes an analytical view of the system that Gia and other mothers in hard circumstances confront.More than telling a story, shaping performances, or conveying emotions, the art of directing is creating a unified spectrum of experience.
Fearing that her future newborn will be taken from her and become trapped in the system, Gia considers the offer of a sympathetic social worker named Carmen for an open adoption, in which Gia, as birth mother, would be a part of her child’s life. Gia, like Carmen and all of the film’s principal characters, is Black, and the politics of race as it relates to child-welfare laws and regulations are at the fore of the drama.
The documentary aspect of “Earth Mama” is doubled with several sequences of the bearing of witness. In two of them, the system elicits the testimony of women who’ve lost custody of their children. The women detail their experiences sincerely, for therapeutic purposes, but the punitive essence of these confessions is spotlighted by Gia’s refusal to stand and deliver, an act of silent defiance that exemplifies her repudiation of the system at large.