By Elizabeth Willoughby on
Model, editor, author, activist and now director Christy Turlington has made a new documentary, No Woman, No Cry, which will premier later this month at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.
The film is Turlington’s attempt to bring attention to promising work being done around the world to improve maternal mortality.
“In 2005, while pregnant with my second child,” said Turlington, "I traveled with the organization CARE to El Salvador. As part of CARE’s water project, I visited a remote village where pregnant women and mothers of newborns had walked for miles to access clean water. For some, this was also their only opportunity to receive some form of antenatal and postnatal care."
Shocked by the high rate of deaths during pregnancy and delivery in such parts of the world – particularly since most of the deaths are preventable – Turlington spent the following years studying various programs that are successfully reducing maternal mortality. Covering Bangladesh, Tanzania, Guatemala and the US, these programs and the people behind them are portrayed in her feature-length film as a means to inspire better advocacy and more action.
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