Project Description

A Healthy Baby Girl is an autobiographical documentary chronicling the filmmaker's experience with cervical cancer caused by diethylstilbestrol (DES). Shot over five years, this one-hour video-diary explores what happens when science, marketing, and corporate power intervene in the deepest family relationships. The distribution campaign (beginning in 1997) makes explicit the connections between these issues, using a national public television broadcast as a focal opportunity to advance community awareness and long-term local activism.

Civic Engagement/Dialogue Activities

The producer worked with cross-class, cross-constituency coalitions of activists and educators across the country to design an effective strategy for media-based activism. The film was shown as a work-in-progress to focus groups in different regions, bringing together organizers and individuals representing different constituencies. Participants completed detailed questionnaires; responses helped to ensure that the film would be useful, accessible, and relevant to a broad audience. Focus groups also helped to determine concrete ways to build alliances between people that may not otherwise recognize their common ground—for example, a DES mother and an oil refinery worker exposed to hormone-disrupting PCBs. Using these questionnaires, the producer worked with a media educator and organizers to develop informative viewer materials. National and local partner organizations helped to identify opportunities to create links between screenings of the film and local discussion groups.

Information Sources
Information Sources: Presentation by Judith Helfand, Northampton Film Festival; project materials.