In The Ethics of Opting Out – Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects, Mari Ruti explores the creative potential of opting out of “the good life”: normative ideals of success, happiness, reproductivity and self-actualisation, deeply tied to heteronormative-capitalist-patriarchal notions of living and loving.

Something I have noticed when seeing people give birth in hospital, is that at times I can sense anger underneath exhaustion and an unwillingness to be present. A quiet kind of fury.

Being filmed during pregnancy, birth and in the postpartum period means showing skin. The transformation we want to witness and capture is bodily. It happens under, through and on the skin. Inside the womb, through the birth canal or an incision, on the chest while breast-/chest-/bottle-feeding.

[…] sweating, leaking milk, bleeding. Skin.

I am drawn to the wild woman archetype. In Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés describes her as a fierce archetypal figure who expresses embodied knowledge, intuition, and creative force.

Giving birth is a rite of passage. It is one of the most significant and life-altering moments of transformation a person can experience — whether we give birth vaginally or by caesarean, in a forest or in a highly medicalised hospital setting.

As an experimental filmmaker, I’ve become obsessed with how birth is represented in visual media – particularly the emergence phase of labour, the moment when the baby’s body begins to appear.

Looking at birth films and photography, I noticed: until very recently, this moment was rarely represented without hands involved.