Entertainment

Pippa Bennett Warner and Pippa Vosper Talk “22+1” – LFF


“This film should be in everyone’s homes. It should be easily accessible. Our ultimate goal is for it to be a streaming movie like Netflix,” actress-turned-filmmaker Pippa Bennett Warner (London gangs) tells me about her ideal destination for her directorial debut 22+1Which was shown this week at the London Film Festival.

It’s not uncommon for me to hear such statements from a director, but Bennett Warner and her creative partner, Pippa Vosper, are fueled by a unique set of ambitions.

22+1 is a short project written by Bennett Warner and Vosper alongside screenwriter Keefe Chadwick (Competitors). Vosper, a veteran writer and fashion editor, produced and created the original concept. The story was inspired by research Vosper conducted for her 2022 book Beyond Grief: Navigating the Journey of Pregnancy and Baby Loss, She wrote after her son Axel died after being born at 20 weeks in 2017.

“400 women became the subjects of papers in my book,” Vosper explains. “And the more I talked to people across the country, the more similarities I found with women of color who were coming forward with stories that were too similar to be a coincidence.”

In fact, across the UK, black women are more than twice as likely to die in childbirth as their white counterparts, while babies born to black mothers are at a sharply increased risk of stillbirth. In the United States, black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, according to the CDC. This is the place 22+1 The film begins with Ruby, played by Bennett Warner, trying to cope with the grief of a late pregnancy loss while experiencing underlying racism in the health system.

Vosper explains that she felt a responsibility to highlight her findings, but she knew she couldn’t carry the story solely as a white woman.

“I had to find the right person that we could work with, so that I could give the story of the loss of a child to someone who could revere it, but also tell it through statistics and a reality point of view,” Vosper says.

That’s when she tapped Bennett Warner, who starred in the Sky crime drama London gangs, See how they run (2022), and Netflix’s latest thriller Woman in cabin 10.

“Pippa called me one day and said, ‘I think you should direct the movie.’ “I’m so grateful that she did, because now I can’t imagine moving forward without directing being part of my life,” Bennett-Warner says.

“We had the most amazing team. Dan Smith from Bastille, who is a friend of mine, wrote an original song and composed the soundtrack. Francine Leach was my editor, and she absolutely directed it. I had the opportunity to work with Oliver Tarney, a five-time Oscar-nominated sound designer. It was the most amazing creative process.”

Vosper notes that she and her team raised money for the project over four years. Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli’s EON Productions are co-producers on the project along with Pip Pip Productions. Vosper was the lead producer, and her company 3A Productions holds full rights. In her first experience as a film producer, Vosper says the process was one of the most satisfying of her career, but she was also quietly surprised by “moments of misogyny” throughout the process.

“That’s the one thing that surprised me,” she says, “and I’ve been in the magazine business for a long time. I started working at iD with Edward Enninful back in the day, and that’s how long I’ve been at it.”

The film was screened in front of a group of senior UK health officials, including Kate Brentworth, England’s chief midwifery officer, at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital ahead of the LFF. The NHS, the UK’s publicly funded healthcare system, has now inquired about sourcing the film as an internal training resource.

“We are now working on a way to make this happen so that the film can serve as a training tool for maternity services,” says Vosper.

The film team was also contacted by British Health Minister Wes Streeting.

“It’s now a matter of when the presentation takes place in Parliament,” Vosper explains. “We are also speaking with Baroness Amos, who we met two weeks ago. She is now leading the investigation into maternal trauma, focusing on the discrepancies and disparities in black and mixed heritage within maternity services. She has ideas about how we can work together when the investigation is concluded in the spring.”

Vosper and Bennett Warner now have their eyes on “regional expansion,” aiming to use the story to highlight how the same issues affect healthcare systems around the world.

“If we can show this movie on a streaming platform or a terrestrial channel, it will allow people to understand what is happening, and that is what we want for the story,” Vosper concludes.

LFF ends tomorrow, October 19th.

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