Saint Frances

Dear Mark,

Saint Frances is remarkable in its foregrounding of female reproductive rights. The film portrays female-specific experiences which are rarely considered in cinematic discourse: abortion, post-natal depression and menstruation, to name but a few. The characters in Saint Frances give voice and physicality to these experiences through the film's warm and naturalistic rhetoric. The somewhat directionless thirty-something protagonist, Bridget, takes up a job looking after the child, Frances, of same-sex couple Annie and Maya. The film follows the women as they deal with testing personal journeys, and the kindness that ensues between them along the way. The film does not shy away, either, from the cruelties of women towards each other, from the sonographer who insists Bridget looks at the image of the foetus she is about to abort, to the woman in the park who insists that Annie covers up when breast feeding. This exposes society's discomfort with the female experience, and it falls to Frances - the next generation - to move the conversation forwards as she embraces her two mums, and gives Bridget hope and spirit in female empowerment.

Saint Frances has parallels with its contemporary picture Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always, another film which deals with the trauma of women, in this case teenagers, as they struggle to exercise their reproductive rights in the face of an aggressively pro-life climate. The hope is that these films are a beginning of free and open dialogue concerning issues which have laid dormant for far too long.