Based on the documentary short she helmed with actor Taylor Russell, Savannah Leaf’s Earth Mama is an intimate, unabashedly political, and decisively non-judgmental look at one mother’s determined attempts to regain custody of her two children. Gia (Tia Nomore) is struggling to work enough hours at her part-time photo studio job to pay for the home she needs before she can be reunited with her kids — struggling because the state also requires her to attend classes on topics like addiction recovery, which are eating into her time. What’s more, Gia is also heavily pregnant, and her looming due date sets a clock ticking on her efforts to satisfy her caseworker and decide what’s best for her new baby. 

There’s a depressingly cyclical nature to all this heartbreak, as testified to by the real people who sometimes pierce the drama to share their own experiences of the system Gia is navigating. Their contributions — along with Nomore’s lived-in performance and Leaf’s assured touch — deepen the urgency and emotion of the movie, which is as much a commentary on the dehumanizing bureaucracy of the social care system as it is Gia’s own particular story.

Earth Mama’s subject matter and storytelling steer it into the realm of social realism, but that genre rarely looks like it does here. Cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes shoots all this raw emotion on gorgeous, grainy 16mm, but the film sometimes drifts into outright dreamlike interludes inspired by the natural environment of its Bay Area setting: redwood forests and lapping ocean waves. For Gia, the magical realist excursions she embarks on are a balm to all the hardship she experiences — they’re an escape. What’s more, these scenes of her communing with nature also affirm the near-sacredness of the role she's fighting so hard to protect: that of a mother.