Earth Mama Poetically Depicts the Conflict Between the Natural World and Our Capitalist Nation

“Nature versus nurture,” the phrase originally coined by Victorian-era British polymath Francis Galton, is easy enough to parse on its face. What determines our eventual personhood: The biological cards we’re dealt during gestation, or the myriad circumstances of our individual upbringing? This centuries-old theory is re-examined and contextualized within the landscape of 21st century American capitalism in Earth Mama, the feature debut from writer-director Savanah Leaf (also a former Olympic athlete who played volleyball for Great Britain during the 2012 summer games). Through the struggle of a pregnant 24-year-old Black single mother, Leaf posits that vulnerable populations in this country are all but barred from receiving the resources necessary for being a “suitable” parent. Simply put, capitalism doesn’t nourish. It depletes.

Gia (Oakland rapper Tia Nomore in a stunning screen debut) is doing just about everything she can to keep the fracturing facets of her life from breaking apart completely. She lives in California’s Bay Area during the mid-aughts, working minimum wage at a bygone mall storefront of the era: those portrait photography studios where soft-focus family photos were taken amid stock photo backgrounds of palm trees and American flags. Her two elementary-aged children are currently wards of the state in foster care, her relationship with them restricted to hourly supervised visits at a local office. Branded an “unfit mother” by the state due to her previous drug use and inadequate single-parent income (not to mention the deep-seated racism intrinsic to the system), she’s currently undergoing a scrutinizing evaluation process that would, ideally, reunite her family. Her anxiety about their reunification is exacerbated by the fact that she’s pregnant with a third child, due in a matter of weeks. Gia relies on her similarly ready-to-burst best friend Trina (fellow Bay Area rapper Doechii) and kindly neighbor Mel (Keta Price) whenever they offer assistance – assembling a crib, snagging take-out tacos – but otherwise realizes that the future happiness of her children rests solely on her shoulders. As a result of this pressure, she approaches her caseworker Miss Carmen (Erika Alexander) with a prospect she previously disregarded – that of putting her unborn child up for an open adoption.

In many ways, Earth Mama is a pointed reflection on Leaf’s own family, expanded from her 2020 short film The Heart Still Hums, which she co-directed with Bones and All actress Taylor Russell. Both films were made in response to Leaf’s younger sister entering the family through adoption when she tested positive for methamphetamines shortly after her mother gave birth. While The Heart Still Hums adopts a documentary approach to depict five women navigating poverty, addiction, homelessness and abuse while still trying to raise their children, Earth Mama hones in on what one woman’s plight signifies for the lack of resources for maligned mothers across the country (this viewpoint is slightly widened by short monologues from women attending Gia’s mandatory NA meetings, which bookend the film).

Either way, it’s clear the filmmaker was deeply touched by her brief interaction with her sister’s birth mother, and Earth Mama goes as far as reconstructing Leaf’s own family dynamic at the time of the adoption while rooting the film in the now-estranged birth mother’s perspective. There’s still an element of unshakable realism embedded in the film’s core, owed greatly to the largely non-professional Bay Area actors that form Gia’s immediate social circle and Nomore’s resonant performance. But Earth Mama is strongest when it indulges in Leaf’s sharp cinematic sensibility. The staggering environmental beauty of the region envelops Gia in stunning shots that portray budding motherhood as a natural wonder all its own; to regulate and restrict such a biologically innate process would seem as cruel as forbidding the natural life cycle of essential flora and fauna.