How Bafta winner Savanah Leaf made one of the most striking films of the 2024 awards season
The opening of the film Earth Mama is probably one of the most striking you’ll see this awards season. A candid, unaffected monologue - it had me in tears within minutes, though it wasn’t the work of some Oscar-nominee but rather of a real woman who’d been cast because of her lived experience.
Within minutes the viewer is plunged into a taut world of systemic oppression and into the mind of a formidable new filmmaking talent: 30-year-old writer/ director Savanah Leaf.
“A few years ago, I made a short documentary called The Heart Still Hums,” she tells me, explaining how the opening of Earth Mama came about, “which ended up being kind of emotional research for the film.”
The 2020 documentary, co-directed by Leaf and her friend, the actress Taylor Russell, focused on the plight of five women fighting for their children through homelessness and drug addiction - and on the work of two nonprofit organisations helping them.
“And she was one of the women that was utilising
