Gia, like Carmen and all of the film’s principal characters, is Black, and the politics of race as it relates to child-welfare laws and regulations are at the fore of the drama. Gia is pregnant, and, because she’s deemed unable to provide a stable home environment, she’s at risk of losing custody of her third child, too.įearing that her future newborn will be taken from her and become trapped in the system, Gia considers the offer of a sympathetic social worker named Carmen (Erika Alexander) for an open adoption, in which Gia, as birth mother, would be a part of her child’s life. Gia works part time at a photo studio, and is eager to work more hours to earn more money and improve her household circumstances, but she’s prevented from doing so by the labyrinthine schedule of courses, training sessions, and therapy meetings that the child-welfare office mandates as part of her effort to regain custody. The kids are in the foster-care system as a result of Gia’s drug addiction (she’s in recovery), and she can see them only in supervised visits of an hour per week.
#BLACK WALLPAPER HEART MOVIE#
It’s set in Oakland and stars the rapper Tia Nomore, in her first movie role, as Gia Wilson, a twenty-four-year-old mother of two young children, Trey (Ca’Ron Coleman) and Shaynah (Alexis Rivas). The story takes place at a crucial intersection of intimate life and public policy. In the process, she reinvigorates one of the basic elements of movies, the closeup, and restores its centrality as the beating heart of the cinema. That’s what Savanah Leaf achieves with her first feature film, “Earth Mama” (opening Friday), which offers a crucial reminder that a sense of style needn’t be ornamental and a sense of form needn’t be abstract. A good director is like a powerful magnetic field whose presence orients the film’s many elements, from the big ideas to the fine details, to form a double-sided reflection of the world at large and of the filmmaker’s inner world. More than telling a story, shaping performances, or conveying emotions, the art of directing is creating a unified spectrum of experience.
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