‘Aftershock’ puts human face to maternal health crisis in US

It was 2017 when filmmaker Paula Eiselt started seeing articles about rising maternal mortality rates in the United States. She’d had traumatic experiences giving birth to her four children, but didn’t realize that the problems were widespread and disproportionately affecting Black women.

Tonya Lewis Lee, in her travels and conversations promoting infant mortality awareness, had also begun hearing stories about people's sisters, friends and cousins who had died after childbirth. Though neither knew each other at the time, they both came to the same conclusion: This story needed to be told.

“What happened to me on an individual level was part of a much larger crisis that most profoundly affects Black women,” Eiselt said. “I really felt called to use whatever skills I have to help shed light on this topic and uplift the work that Black women have been doing for decades to curb this crisis.”

Eiselt knew of Lee’s work in the space and one day they “quite literally” ran into one another and set off on a journey to put a human face to the dire statistics. The result is “Aftershock,” the documentary they co-directed. It debuted Sunday at the Sundance Film Festival, where it is seeking a distributor.

According to the CDC, the maternal mortality rate was significantly higher in 2019 (754 deaths) than 2018 (658 deaths). The increase was statistically significant for non-Hispanic Black women, whose maternal mortality rate was 2.5 times that of non-Hispanic white women and 3.5 times that of Hispanic women. But both knew they would need to go beyond the statistics for their film to be compelling.

“I did not want it to be a big survey film with a lot of people just talking at you,” Lee said.

Then they found Shawnee Benton Gibson, whose daughter, Shamony Gibson, died in October...