100
Los Angeles Times by Sheri Linden
An extraordinary vérité portrait of Manila’s Fabella Hospital.
Motherland (Bayang Ina Mo)
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The planet’s busiest maternity hospital is located in one of its poorest and most populous countries: the Philippines. This emotional film takes you there, where poor women face devastating consequences as their country struggles with reproductive health policy and the politics of conservative Catholic ideologies.
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What are critics saying?
80
Screen Daily
An eye-opening, moving and often shocking film, Motherland is a serious-minded documentary without talking heads, music, or narrative structure.
80
Variety by Dennis Harvey
There’s an ease of intimacy to Diaz’s observations that suggests her crew was embedded for some time in the ward. The camerawork is crisp and bright, the editorial assembly likewise effortlessly engaging, capturing a sense of lives revealed in the everyday workings of the hospital.
80
Screen International
An eye-opening, moving and often shocking film, Motherland is a serious-minded documentary without talking heads, music, or narrative structure.
80
The Hollywood Reporter by Justin Lowe
The women of Motherland emerge as an entirely different class of heroines, demonstrating Diaz’s insight and compassion in documenting their experiences without judgment or condescension and allowing them to convey their own individual perspectives.
70
Village Voice by Kristen Yoonsoo Kim
Motherland opens with a 24-year-old woman already on her fifth pregnancy — just one of many such cases that director Ramona S. Diaz reveals in the vérité-style documentary, which recalls the observational techniques and insights of the films of Frederick Wiseman.
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