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Saturday, Nov 20, 1999
And Baby Makes Two
Preceded by: A Stranger's Supper: Centenarian Mountain Women of Montenegro (Mark Milich, 1999, work-in-progress, 12 mins, Color, Video). Visitors of the Night (An van Dienderen, Belgium, 1998, 34 mins, Color, Video)The efforts of eight single women intent on having children are documented in And Baby Makes Two (59 mins, 16mm) as they investigate methods from international adoption to alternative insemination. Part of a support group in New York, they are fairly homogeneous, but the ambivalence they face from others, including family, and their own complex feelings regarding single motherhood make for an affecting exploration of the choices available to contemporary women. In A Stranger's Supper women over a hundred years old tell their remarkable stories. As they speak of the prevalence of war over the last century, the role of women within the family and society, and the loss of their sons and husbands, the observation of one that "Pain, death, and Montenegro are all the same" comes vividly in relief. An van Dienderen's ambitious Visitors of the Night is both an attempt to discover the Mosou, a matrilineal community in the Yunan province of China, and a meditation on the failure of ethnography to uncover reality. Access to older women is difficult, interviews languish or never materialize, and the filmmaker encounters, rather than a culture practiced, a culture marketed.
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