Good Screenings

EQUALS on Film: Make Women Matter

Directed by Lara Akeju and Lisa Fairbank, Director

Synopsis

Make Women Matter: Five Stories of Female Empowerment. A series of five short documentaries from the frontline of maternal health, offering a unique insight into the challenges and choices facing young women in Africa and Asia as they strive to improve their life chances and advance safe motherhood in their communities.

About the director

• Film guide to download

More Information

Brenda’s Battle 9mins 25secs
A mother of four, Brenda is a woman with a mission – to speak out and to put a stop to unsafe abortions. 13% of all maternal deaths are the result of unsafe abortion, with millions more left injured, disabled or infertile. Despite the fact that abortion has actually been legal since 1996 in South Africa, too many women are still risking their lives by having unsafe abortions offered by bogus doctors. Brenda is a Community Based Educator from a provincial town who has made it her mission to visit women, everywhere from colleges to taxi ranks, to educate them about sexual health, contraception and safe abortions and through this empower them to make choices that ultimately save and improve lives. No easy task in a country where such talk is taboo.

Bwindi’s Babies 7mins 35secs
In the middle of Uganda’s impenetrable forest on the border with Rwanda and Congo, there is a remarkable maternity unit run by an extraordinary woman. Elizabeth Nabadda is the midwife in charge of maternal health at Bwindi Community Hospital. Most of the pregnant women in Elizabeth’s care dig in the fields to feed their families, many are illiterate and some have had to walk hours to get to her, but once in the hospital they get the same high-quality emergency obstetric and ante-natal care as the richest and most educated women in the country, thanks to a life-saving maternity insurance scheme which costs each pregnant mum just one dollar.: “We have taken a vow to save life” says Elizabeth ”If you can’t save life you are in the wrong profession”. This film tells the story of how one mother and baby have their lives saved by Elizabeth and the team at Bwindi.

Zainabu’s Big Decision 7mins 15secs
Zainabu lives in a mud-walled hut in a small village in Sierra Leone. Married at fifteen and with nine surviving children, Zainabu wants to do the best for them but she definitely doesn’t want any more! Through the eyes of Zainabu and her husband Sulley we learn about the different views that couples may have about family planning and contraception. Women like Zainabu are well aware of the health risks of pregnancy and childbirth, and the physical and financial strain of big families, while her husband sees their large family as a status symbol and a blessing from God. He and his friends even worry that the availability of contraception will make women more promiscuous. Despite their conflicting ideas, Zainabu decides to visit the clinic and ultimately makes some decisions that change her life.

A Tale of Two Mothers 8mins
As mothers living and working in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Khadeza and Jahanara would seem to have a lot in common, but in reality their lives are worlds apart. Khadeza works in a garment factory which funds a twice weekly visit by a mobile family planning and sexual health clinic. As a result of this free service, Khadeza and her husband have been able to plan their family; she can afford to educate her son and is in a position to make choices about her own life and future. For Jahanara life is very different, she and three of her seven children work but still struggle on a daily basis to make ends meet. Jahanara can’t afford to keep her children at school and has to borrow money to see a doctor if one of them is ill. For her life is simply a matter of making it from one day to the next.

Love and Life, Live on Air 8mins 40secs
Living and working in the Ugandan capital Kampala, feisty twenty-year-old Doreen educates teenagers about sex and relationships through her innovative weekly radio programme. But Doreen has important decisions of her own to make about her sex life. While she has a steady boyfriend and spends her time giving advice about sex to other young women, she is in fact still a virgin. We follow her as she interviews people around Kampala who talk frankly about their relationship experiences, meets a family planning nurse, and talks to her friend Jackie who lost her virginity at sixteen and subsequently found herself HIV positive and pregnant. At the same time we gain an insight into Doreen’s family life which is based on strong traditional values.

Marie Stopes International, with the support of a grant from the European Commission, is leading a groundbreaking new advocacy and communications campaign around five short films entitled Make Women Matter. The films highlight the reasons why we are currently so far off the target for Millennium Development Goal 5 (MDG5). This goal, which was set in 2000, aims to improve maternal health, reducing by three quarters the maternal mortality ratio and achieving universal access to reproductive health, by 2015

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