Milwaukee Film, the nonprofit arts organization committed to engaging the city and its community through cinematic experiences and maintaining the historic Oriental Theatre and Downer Theatre, presented year two of the Dialogues Documentary Film Festival from Sept. 18 to Sept. 21, 2025.
One sponsor and supporter of the festival was the Women’s Fund of Greater Milwaukee, the only community foundation in Milwaukee dedicated to growing an endowment to guarantee that resources are consistently available to support actions that strategically advance women and girls.
Earlier this summer, they awarded Milwaukee Film a special grant to launch “Cinematic Sisterhood,” a series focusing on and amplifying the visibility and influence of female creatives and their underrepresented stories.
These four features I saw in this series bolstered a common thread and theme of how issues within the healthcare systems, whether they are legal or of human error, fail women and make for prolonged adversity and anguish.
These documentaries are relevant to the Milwaukee community and can help to facilitate discussion on key issues affecting women, especially the continuous battle for personal choice, bodily autonomy, and self-advocacy.
The first picture, “Arrest the Midwife,” directed by Elaine Epstein, was released in March of this year. The narrative concentrates on a particular story of the crackdown on Certified Professional Midwives (CPM) in New York, as the state is one of twelve that does not recognize their credentials. These providers are often preferred by Amish and Mennonite women who would rather have their children at home and avoid commercial hospital birthing.
When these midwives are criminalized and arrested for performing at-home births that serve the extremely private communities of the Amish and Mennonite, this restrictive legislation creates a healthcare desert in rural areas for women who do not have access to the traditional services they are accustomed to.
The story of Elizabeth Catli as a certified professional midwife who was arrested in 2018 is shocking when the film delineates how she had to wait for a year until her indictment, when she was dramatically arraigned for 95 felony counts.
Catlin assisted as a birth attendant and midwife for a generation of Mennonite women in Penn Yan, N.Y. Her support during her trial consisted of her family of 14 children and 20 grandchildren, alongside the hundreds of Mennonites who depended on her.
A striking quality of this documentary is the fact that these women, who have lived rejecting technology and mass media, decide to speak out to aid and assist Catlin.
They consent to being interviewed, filmed and photographed in “Arrest the Midwife,” which substantially demonstrates how much caregivers like Elizabeth Catlin mean to them and their way of life that favors natural home births.
Quiet home births offer little to no intrusion, and this personal choice by the women is infringed upon when New York state legislature restricts the legal pathway for out-of-hospital midwives.
The documentary detailing the desperation of the healthcare desert in rural New York for Amish and Mennonite women is specific to these communities, but the broader war for bodily autonomy through medical choice retains relevance.
In the Milwaukee Film program book for the festival, the organization states that their programming team curated the lineup with the “intention of starting discussions amongst our local audiences about issues and topics that are timely and relevant to the Milwaukee community.” The other three pieces I was able to see also continued a relevant dialogue on the restrictions of medical choice suffered by women.
The United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, returning the authority to the individual states to regulate the right to an abortion.
Abortion in Wisconsin is legal, but proper healthcare access for many women has disappeared and returned repeatedly. Amid current federal funding cuts, the fight for body autonomy and personal choice continues.
I went to the screening of “Zurawski v Texas” on Sept. 21, and the documentary, directed by Abbie Perrault and Maisie Crow, centers on a lawsuit that followed after a Texas woman, Amanda Zurawski, experienced life-threatening septic shock when she was refused an emergency abortion procedure during her pregnancy.
The suit for Zurawski is led by Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, Molly Duane. The case went on to involve 21 other women who had also suffered devastating health ramifications as a result of being denied abortion care. The film shadows three of the women and gives the viewer an in-depth look into the process as a litigator.
An excruciating moment in the documentary is when the State District Court Judge Jessica Mangrum grants the plaintiffs, who had been shown as delivering an emotionally harrowing case in July 2023 (with one throwing up at the stand after having to recount her experiences), a special court order to allow medical exceptions to abortions.
The women are seen as celebrating their victory, but 5 hours later, the state appealed the decision to the Texas Supreme Court.
After the women had worked tirelessly to present their case with Duane representing them, overcoming the nerves and emotional outpourings that come with sharing their traumatizing stories, the same day that they secured a legal win that would allow patients with complications to receive abortion care and doctors to be able to perform without fear of prosecution, their victory was immediately snatched away.
Dr. Austin Dennard, a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist, is one of the women and additional plaintiffs in the case who is featured in the documentary.
She was visibly pregnant while on the stand and was approaching the end of a healthy pregnancy. However, she retold her past story of how she had to travel out of state for an abortion when, at 11 weeks pregnant, she found out that her baby had anencephaly, a fatal condition in which the skull and brain do not develop entirely.
As an OB-GYN, she is also familiar with what it is like as a medical professional to see patients when they are facing complications. She describes how she sees the dire importance of being able to have the choice of receiving a medically necessary abortion in both her personal and professional life.
Within the footage of when she is on the stand during cross-examination, she is asked if she was told personally and directly by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that she could not have an abortion in the state. She responded by saying, “You know, I never thought to ask him.”
The case and questions of the state lawyers revolved around asking the women if officials had personally denied them an abortion. Their counterpoint was that they were denied these procedures by the laws themselves. This argument illustrated how the women felt as though they had no say over their own physical conditions, as if their pregnancies belonged to the government.
The courageous women in the documentary are shown as combating an uphill battle, as they struggle for the right of bodily autonomy that continues to this day.
The laws that dictate how medical professionals respond to troubled pregnancies fail the women and facilitate the occurrence of their traumatic experiences.
A third film I was able to see on Sept. 19 was “The Secret of Me,” directed by Grace Hughes-Hallett. The story that the documentary tells is another of the harms that can be inflicted if medical professionals respond in a certain predetermined way, just after pregnancy, in infancy.
Jim Ambrose is the subject, formerly known as Kristi. The movie tracks the story of how Kristi found out she was intersex and was lied to about her identity from birth. It was not until she read in a college textbook in a feminist studies class that the classification of being an intersex individual was possible.
This documentary has a quality to enrage, as Jim retells how the trajectory of his life was altered forever from the moment that the doctor present at his birth in 1976 medically intervened and altered his body to represent female genitalia when he was born intersex.
Ambrose repeatedly states how he has to reckon with this fact of medical reconstruction that he could not consent to as an infant for the rest of his life.
As Kristi was born intersex but was raised as a female with constructed female genitalia that only simply appeared as so, who had to take hormone pills and undergo surgeries throughout her life, it is resonant when she is described as someone who grew up uncomfortable in her own skin.
Despite the tragedy of the medical failure that was pushed onto Kristi, the picture also establishes a point of the importance of community that can help a person through a period of discovery.
Similar to how the women united in the case of Zurawski v. State of Texas found kinship in one another amid their overwhelming battle for legal bodily autonomy, Kristi finds solace in the queer community after she moves to San Francisco. She also begins work as an advocate and intersex activist with fellow leaders Cheryl Chase and Tiger Devore, starting to explore the possibilities of how she can be comfortable in her identity.
The fourth and final film with related themes I was able to catch a screening of during the Milwaukee Film Dialogues Documentary Festival was the Milwaukee-made animated short film “Malignant Practice.”
The world premiere of this movie was this screening on Sept. 21 at the Oriental Theatre. It was written, directed, produced and edited by Kristin E. Catalano, besides being animated by Andrew Megow.
1 in 8 women will be diagnosed in their lifetime with breast cancer, and this film revolves around the agonizing chronicle of a “Jane Doe” who experiences medical misfortune, to put it lightly, after both a doctor and a mammogram missed her life-changing illness.
To watch this piece is to be put on an emotional rollercoaster ride, to say the least.
This woman, whose heart-wrenching situation represents so many, experiences the turmoil of being shocked with a Stage 3 cancer diagnosis, having to continue to work as a healthcare professional while being treated with chemotherapy herself and facing insurance troubles when it does not cover receiving a mammogram when under 40.
She is constantly faced with setbacks on her narrow-staired journey to the return of a normal, healthy life. She reckons with the fact that her situation was made worse when she could not have begun her treatment earlier.
Her doctor originally dismissed the lump on her breast that she came in concerned about. As a result, her chances of survival were lower once she was able to finally start treatment.
The picture stresses the importance of self-advocacy for personal wellbeing, as Jane Doe may have faced an even more dangerous situation if she had not been insistent with her concern, highlighting the harm of the flaws that persist within this country and its healthcare system.
A particular flaw that the documentary emphasizes is that the healthcare system does not have a succinct medical error reporting system in place. Jane Doe is depicted as imagining what it would be like to write to her doctor and bestow him with an awareness of how he had missed her cancer.
The Wisconsin Breast Cancer Coalition was a community partner for the screening of this documentary, along with the organization After Breast Cancer Diagnosis.
