Sister
The courageous warriors on the frontline of the battle against Third World deaths in childbirth



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Brenda has over 20 years experience in various aspects of filmmaking. She has worked as a script supervisor, a script consultant, and extensively as a researcher. She is a member of the researchers organization FOCAL International.
Brenda has made five short films for NGOS shot as a one-person crew. These projects are the foundation of Brendas filmmaking style, verité documentary rooted in social activism. SISTER is her first feature documentary.
I'm a mother, daughter and a sister. I am the eighth of eight children born by an emergency cesarean section, which resulted in my mother's emergency hysterectomy at age 33. The subject of this film has been circling me for a long time. My family is from a remote part of Canada in Nova Scotia. My grandmother, Martha, gave birth to 16 children - four were stillborn and another died at 2 years old. Her first child died when she was 19 and the last one died when she was 39, I remember thinking about it a lot as a child and since then.
I first picked up a camera in 2006 and shortly afterwards participated in an NGO/Filmmaker collaborative workshop in Uganda. The first things I shot there were an emergency cesarean section and an interview with a pregnant woman whose baby was stillborn due to malaria. In 2008, I documented the Gotland Course in Emergency Obstetric Care for mid-level health workers from Africa and Asia. A renowned Swedish Obstetrician and Gynecologist, Dr. Staffan Bergstrom, known for his background in training maternal health workers in developing countries runs the course. Dr. Bergstrom literally wrote the book on the subject. It was while documenting the Gotland Course that I met an Ethiopian Health Officer, Goitom Berhane, who had been working at a rural hospital and was in charge of all obstetric emergencies. And it was while I was transcribing Goitoms interview that realized I was going to make a film about maternal and newborn mortality.