Listen to Me follows the very personal and intimate journeys of three maternal health practitioners and advocates from pregnancy to motherhood. Woven together, these unique stories offer a profound look into the layered lives of Black women and the core issues and circumstances that place them at higher risk for complications from pregnancy and childbirth. Listen to Me challenges us to shift the narrative from crisis response to generational care and to reimagine maternal health as a continuum of justice, healing and radical listening. 

Director Biography - Stephanie Etienne, Kanika Harris

Kanika Harris, PhD, MPH is a behavioral health scientist based in Washington, D.C.. Kanika’s work broadly focuses on social determinants of health, birth equity, women’s health, and HIV prevention. Kanika is a mother of three, near-miss survivor, doula, and birth justice advocate. Listen to Me is her first film.

Stephanie Etienne, CNM, MPH is a filmmaker, midwife and herbalist. She serves on the boards of several organizations dedicated to birth justice in the U.S. and Haiti. Her work addresses sexual and reproductive health as spaces for empowerment and self-discovery. Stephanie is of Haitian descent and lives in Baltimore, MD with her family. Listen to Me is her first film.

Director Statement

As filmmakers who are also Black mothers, public health advocates, and birth workers, Listen to Me is the convergence of our convictions, passions, professional experience, and the urgency of the issue at the heart of the film.

We met in 2015 and quickly bonded over our shared backgrounds in maternal health. Soon after, Dr. Shalon Irving, the brilliant Lieutenant Commander of the U.S. Public Health Services and CDC epidemiologist, died just weeks after giving birth to her daughter, Soleil in January 2017. Despite her impressive credentials, excellent health insurance, and good health, medical negligence and institutional racism were the clear cause of Dr. Irving’s senseless death.

Heartbroken for Dr. Irving’s daughter and family, we also saw ourselves in her story. If this could happen to Shalon, it could happen to any of us. In the years since her death, we have been inundated with terrifying stories of Black women and families suffering sometimes fatal consequences because of health care that is negligent at best, and criminal at worst. While Dr. Irving’s death catapulted the issue of Black maternal health into the nation’s consciousness, something has been missing from the conversation -- the voices of Black women.

Listen to Me illuminates the institutional racism, intergenerational trauma, and societal injustices that have robbed so many Black mothers of healthy births. Exploring issues that have been at the core of our work for many years, the film uses personal narrative to deepen our understanding of the factors impacting our ability to become pregnant and have healthy pregnancies and postpartum experiences. With an aim to generate lasting change, the film also highlights the many ways Black women are creating solutions through advocacy, community building, a return to holistic health, and ancestral knowledge.

Rather than developing a traditional documentary project with heavy reliance on expert interviews and statistics, we have centered our own voices and experiences to draw attention to the issues facing tens of thousands of Black women and birthing people each year. We are placing our protagonists in the position of experts.

Listen to Me is the natural and creative offshoot of work we have been doing for nearly 20 years. Film has allowed us to translate and communicate the intention of our work in a way that research papers, articles and presentations simply cannot. We are maternal health experts who have turned the camera on ourselves to tell the story of how we endured these challenges and found healing after our own heartbreaking experiences. Through the stories of women who have lived to tell it (and 1 who did not), we show that the solution begins with seeing Black women, affirming them, and taking action to ensure they are being heard within the healthcare system.