Joynt teams with trans actors Angelica Ross, Zackary Drucker, Jen Richards, Max Wolf Valerio, Silas Howard and Stephen Ira to bring to life both Agnes and other other subjects in Garfinkel's research. The film - which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, winning two major prizes - is having its Canadian premiere at Hot Docs, offering audiences its innovative approach to storytelling. And while Torres's story has long been considered a pioneering moment in trans history, it's given a remarkable new platform in Chase Joynt's convention-defying film Framing Agnes. In the early 1960s, Agnes Torres - a pseudonymized transgender woman - participated in sociologist Harold Garfinkel's gender health research at UCLA, making her the first subject of an in-depth discussion of transgender identity in sociology. Lucius Dechausay, CBC Unscripted Content senior video producer For Real I know firsthand the overwhelming challenges of navigating the health-care system with practitioners who don't extend the same level of compassion and care to racialized patients, and while this will be a difficult watch, I thank films like this for reminding us that on the other end of those statistics are real Black lives that meant something to someone. Last year, I personally experienced the birth of my baby girl and the death of my father a few months later. The precarious nature of Black life in the medical system is expertly encapsulated in a quote from one expectant Black mother in the film, who states: "A Black woman having a baby is like a Black man at a traffic stop with police." Some of her final words were delivered in a tweet about "dealing with incompetent doctors."ĭirected by Tonya Lewis Lee and Paula Eiselt, the film unpacks the circumstances of these deaths as a starting point to discuss the medical expliotation of Black women dating all the way back to slavery and worsened through modern day capitalism. Isaac, meanwhile, at only 26 years old, died after doctors induced labour and performed what should have been a routine caesarean birth. Two weeks after being discharged from the hospital, despite sharing her pain and symptoms with doctors, she died of a pulmonary embolism.
Gibson was only 30 years old at the time.
By honouring the lives of Shamony Gibson and Amber Rose Isaac in its opening scenes - both who died shortly after giving birth - the film places us in the joy and anticipation of new life, before descending into the unfathomable grief of their respective partners, who became fathers and widowers in the same year.
Aftershock looks at exactly that, exposing the disproportionate number of Black mothers who die every year because of how the American health-care system has failed them.
I was ready for dirty diapers and sleepless nights, but not even remotely prepared for a room full of nervous parents desperately probing the instructors about defibrillators and SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome).Īfter that evening, I had imagined every possible scenario to safeguard my child, but the one very real possibility that I never even considered was that the most vulnerable person in the labour room might not have been my baby, but my partner. That all changed in one evening though – after my wife signed us up for an infant CPR course. When I think back to the birth of my first child, I never held a lot of anxiety.