There’s no getting around how terribly sad it is to watch “Aftershock,” the new documentary from directors Paula Eiselt (“93Queen”) and Tonya Lewis Lee. After all, it shines a light on the tragic deaths of two black mothers in New York who died of complications from childbirth – Shamony Gibson, in 2019, and Amber Isaac, in 2020 – leaving behind young children, partners, families and communities drained by grief .
But alongside despair, there is also light in this documentary. Gibson’s partner, Omari Maynard, and his mother, Shawnee Benton Gibson, a medical social worker with a background in reproductive justice activism, had been mourning their loss for a year and a half when Maynard reached out to Isaac’s newly bereaved partner, Bruce McIntyre. The pair quickly banded together with Benton Gibson and others to engineer change.
Eiselt and Lee have managed to put a human face on the now widely reported crisis of black maternal deaths, allowing them to unpack the underlying factors that led to the crisis without bogging down the narrative in a deluge of statistics. Yet the scenes with the main subjects sometimes seem more staged than the truth, and the audience walks away wishing we knew them better as people.
Yet the images of Maynard and McIntyre raising their children amid grief and outrage, and expressing their vulnerability as well as their strength, act as a powerful counter-narrative to pervasive stereotypes about absent black fathers. “Aftershock” is a moving ode to black families in a society where too many forces are working to tear them apart.
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Unclassified. Duration: 1h26. Watch on Hulu.
