- Directors
- Ebony Blanding, Kate E. Hinshaw
- Rating
- n/a
- Running Time
- 14 minutes
- Release Date
- n/a
Overall Score
Rating Summary
This will be one of many reviews during this year’s SXSW Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.
The craft of experimental film has a long and storied history, starting with such classics as A Trip to the Moon, Man with a Movie Camera, and Scorpio Rising, among countless others. Ten Leaves Dilated, from filmmaker Kate E. Hinshaw, joins the canon of experimental film both in form and subject, creating a truly unique short film about the complicated history of childbirth, through the lens of Cabbage Patch Kids. It’s not only a compelling take on childbirth, but the archival footage mixed with Hinshaw’s own formal experimentation makes it a lovely addition to both the surreal and documentary film worlds.
Hinshaw uses archival footage, the audio of interviews with different women who have experienced childbirth or work in the field, and her own film manipulation, like burning reels of 18mm, to create a really interesting ambience for a film about birth. While usually blanketed in either rosy pinks of joy or dark trauma, there is something refreshing about looking at the reason we are all here through a neutral, if somewhat odd, lens. There is something so haunting about watching a grown woman pretend to deliver a doll from a cabbage to a group of people, using watered down clinical terms like “easy-otomy” and “c-section”- a cabbage section, of course.
Whether or not one enjoys this film, it is deeply compelling, and very easy to look at and get lost in, with all the different sounds and textures that are used. It was a collage of sorts, and one which one must fully let themselves be swallowed into. Much like the Cabbage Patch Kids in their lettuce lairs, one can only imagine. Hinshaw creates a compelling work of art here, and I look forward to seeing her continue to push the boundary of how to tell stories.
still courtesy of SXSW
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