Topics: Pregnancy & Drugs
2007 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Nettie Wild
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
A hospital practice leader advocates keeping drug-using mothers with their babies under a harm-reduction approach.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the moral panic angle here, but Wild's actually arguing the counterintuitive case with zero grandstanding—she lets harm reduction speak for itself, which is somehow more radical than the film most people think they're watching.
A quietly rigorous documentary that positions itself within a lineage of NFB social-issue filmmaking while resisting the didactic impulse; the formal restraint—favoring observation over intervention—is what gives the advocacy its weight.
The decision to let the hospital leader's own voice and presence carry the argument, rather than layering in expert testimony or montage, transforms what could've been a policy tract into something intimate and undeniable.