‘Aftershock’ Review: Sundance Doc Exposes the Bias in U.S. Maternal Mortality Rates

William Earl Streaming industry leaders Mark Niemiec, senior vice president of sales at Salesforce, and Michael Bishara, group senior vice president and general manager of direct-to-consumer at Discovery, Inc., will join Variety TV writer Mónica Zorrilla for a conversation in the Variety Streaming Room on March 2.  Discovery+ is one of the newest entries in an ultra-competitive streaming marketplace. During their conversation, Bishara will touch upon the streamer’s strategy to gain the attention of new audiences.

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Disney’s Onyx Collective and ABC News have jointly acquired Aftershock, which picked up the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Impact for Change upon its debut there last month. The latest from directors Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee will stream as an original film from Onyx Collective on Hulu in the U.S., on Star+ in Latin America, and on Disney+ in all other territories.

Lewis Lee told Sharon Waxman at TheWrap’s Sundance Studio how she first became aware of the disproportionate numbers of preventable deaths of Black mothers and babies.“Way back in 2007, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services asked me to be the spokesperson for their infant mortality awareness raising campaign called ‘A Healthy Baby Begins With You,’” she said.

What do you have to say to the Russian people in the event of your death? Filmmaker Daniel Roher (“Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band,”) asks his subject, political Russian dissident, Alexei Navalny, at the beginning of his engrossing new doc “Navalny.” “C’mon,” Navalny scoffs, dismissively, as if highly attuned to Roher’s “gotcha” question he could frame posthumously in the case of the political agitator’s untimely death.

Bleecker Street has acquired U.S. rights to the dramatic thriller 892, starring John Boyega (Star Wars franchise) and the late Michael Kenneth Williams (The Wire), which recently made its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in U.S. Dramatic Competition and won its Special Jury Award for Ensemble Cast. The independently-financed distributor is planning a late summer release in theaters nationwide.

Directed by Paula Eislet and Tonya Lewis Lee (Spike Lee’s producer and partner), the documentary “Aftershock” chronicles the dismal maternal mortality rate that women of color face in the United States medical system. The statistics are shameful, pointing to a systemic racist indifference, and the documentary chronicles the staggering number of times that expectant mothers entering into hospitals simply do not come out alive due to a lack of care and sensitivity.

Michelle Williams and Heath Ledger have inspired one of the new films at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

including here at TheWrap), but has drawn fire on social media for the fact that the film calls the men “terrorists,” and because the filmmaker herself is not Muslim. One typical tweet by writer Jude Chehab of Turkish news website TRT World says: “When I, a practising Muslim woman say [the film’] is problematic, my voice should be stronger than a white woman saying it’s not.”Smaker, who spent five years making the film, told TheWrap that the movie challenges assumptions about people Americans regard as terrorists, while also offering a never-before-seen perspective into the men who embraced the ideology of groups like al Qaeda.

NEW YORK -- Rarely have past and present mingled in a documentary the way they do in “Descendant,” a nonfiction account of the last known ship to bring African captives to the American South for enslavement.Margaret Brown's “Descendant," which recently premiered at the virtual Sundance Film Festival, chronicles the discovery of the ship, a 90-foot-long wooden schooner that was secretly burned and sunk near Mobile, Alabama, after it was used to illegally take and enslave 100 Africans on a trip across the Atlantic in the mid-19th century, decades after the international slave trade had been outlawed.“Descendant” closely documents the finding of the Clotilda, which was confirmed in 2019. For locals, it's a long overdue affirmation of a long-obscured history that for a century was little spoken of.

As you know, the in person festival was canceled due to rising concerns of the omicron variant of Covid-19 and it has moved to an online screening format for press and attendees.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic“What would you do if you had six months left to live?” asks the doctor who diagnoses a do-nothing bureaucrat with terminal cancer in “Ikiru,” a 1952 masterpiece I suspect precious few of those who see its English-language remake, “Living,” will recall. Quite unlike anything else in Akira Kurosawa’s career, “Ikiru” ranks among the Japanese director’s best: With no samurai battles or set-pieces, the low-key contemporary melodrama raises profound questions about how we choose to spend the limited time we’re afforded, focusing on a stoic functionary about whom even the narrator apologizes, “He might as well be a corpse.”Culturally specific as so much of “Ikiru” may be, its lessons translate quite well to midcentury British society, courtesy of Nobel-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who did the work of adapting it to 1953 London for director Oliver Hermanus (“Moffie”).

Chris Willman Music WriterNetflix’s epic Kanye West documentary, “Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy,” will unfold in three feature-length parts, as the subtitle promises. (The first part premiered Sunday in the Sundance Film Festival, and gets a one-night theatrical release Feb.

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Addie Morfoot ContributorBlack women, along with Native Americans and Alaska natives, are three times more likely to die before, during or after having a baby, and more than half of these deaths are preventable, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee take a deep dive into that statistic in their Sundance documentary “Aftershock.”The film tells the story of two young black women who died due to childbirth complications that could have been prevented. Through interviews with bereaved fathers and mothers, birth-workers and physicians, Eiselt and Lewis Lee examine the maternal health crisis happening throughout the country.