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“Targeting Women of Color”: Director Dawn Porter | Trapped
Dawn Porter's Trapped In every film, there is the story that you knew you were telling, the story the audience perceives. But there is always some other story, a secret story. It might be the result of your hidden motivations for making the film, or, instead, the result of themes that only became clear to you after you made the movie. It might be something very personal, or it might be a story you didn’t even know you were telling. What is your film’s secret story?
I was very attracted to this story as not just a story about choice, but about political power – who has it and how it’s used. I also knew and was very interested in exploring the racial component to this story, and it turns out that clinic protestors are indeed targeting women of color and attempting to shame them very specifically with posters of black babies and by shouting things like Black Lives Matter in a very twisted usage of this phrase. I find this so offensive. But this is also a story of poverty. I spoke to women who would love to have another child but know they can’t raise one financially; women who have to sell possessions to afford an abortion; women who have been made to believe they are going to hell. So much additional suffering, and so many obstacles that make an already difficult decision needlessly degrading. If women are to control their future, they must have control over how and when they become mothers.
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday January 24 at 6pm — Temple Theatre]
