‘There Is an Urgency to These Conversations’

Elizabeth Sankey’s documentary Witches was not what I expected.

From the title and the U.K. filmmaker’s previous work like her 2019 documentary Romantic Comedy, I thought Witches would be a film essay that tackled an aspect of popular culture with Sankey’s trademark wit and humour. But the film stands apart from her oeuvre (Sankey is also part of an indie pop band called Summer Camp); this film is something distinctly different.

After she gave birth to her son, Sankey experienced serious postpartum anxiety. Both she and her new baby were hospitalized in a specialized psychiatric unit dedicated to treating women with this mental health condition.

With courage, humour and profound compassion, Sankey tells her story through a collection of film clips drawn from a dizzying array of films and television shows, including The Witches of Eastwick, The Craft, Rosemary’s Baby and Bewitched. From this wealth of cinematic history, she extrapolates from her own experience to draw larger conclusions about the role of witches, midwives and traditional healers through the ages.

From the European witch trials that resulted in the murder of many thousands of women to the startling rates of suicide for postpartum women, the film is a brave, necessary look at perinatal mental health, which is still shrouded in secrecy and stigma.

Witches is screening as part of the monthly Frames of Mind mental health film series at the Cinematheque in Vancouver on March 19.

Ahead of the Vancouver screening, we caught up with Sankey in the U.K. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: When I first saw your film, I immediately wanted a lot of women to see it. The foundational shame around postpartum mental health is still so secret and so hidden. When I had my son 23 years ago, it was like, “Wow, no one tells you this stuff. Not even your own mother.”

I’m curious about the reaction from other women after they’ve seen the film. Is it an unbridled relief, being able to talk about it openly?

Elizabeth Sankey: Well, thank you, first of all, for telling people about it, because that’s the whole reason that we made it — so that we could get as many people as possible to watch it. It does feel like it’s a film that people want to share if it connected with them.

There is an urgency to these conversations, because the suicide rates are still so high.

One of the things that’s been really tragic about showing it and doing Q&As is the number of people who have said to me, “I lost someone.” That’s been one of the most common responses, which is horrific, and worldwide.

It’s not just women; a lot of men connect to it as well. It makes a lot of people think about their own mothers.

People finding it very challenging. Some people are quite angry or upset with me. Other people worry about my son.

There’s a whole spectrum of emotions, but the main one has been this feeling of women saying, “This represents me. This is something that I have felt, and I want to share it with other people, which is fantastic.”

When it comes to issues around not just childbirth, but almost anything to do with women, there’s a slight bit of progress, and then a huge, regressive backlash, which I think we’re right in the middle of at the moment, especially in the U.S., with women’s reproductive rights and health care. At the same time, there is the re-emergence of the trad wife, as well as rapidly increasing rates of septic shock and maternal death rates in places like Texas because of lack of access to abortion. What do you make of this push and pull between progress in history and the regressive return to problematic models from the past?

I think the trad wife thing is so fascinating, but I don’t enjoy watching the content. I don’t get it. I obviously worry about the alt-right and fascist implications that some of the leading trad wives seem to sort of perpetuate. But at the same time, I’m like, it’s just women making their own butter and homeschooling their eight children. There are so many more terrifying things happening, like, as you say, the lack of access to abortion.

I am more worried about everything you’re saying about Texas, about women dying in childbirth and women who are not getting support. I look at someone like Hannah Neeleman, who is obviously the most famous trad wife, and I think I don’t agree with her politics. I don’t like what she’s doing. But at the same time, she is making money. She is running her own business. She’s doing what she wants to do.

Trad wives are a noisy, big, bright thing to look at. I don’t want to be overly critical of America or anything, but that’s something that I really feel like I’ve seen with Trump, and also with my film, to some extent as well, is this discomfort in sort of really looking at the foundational problems, specifically in America, like gun violence. You can have eight kids, but when they get into school, we’re not going to stop them from being shot. It’s so mad to me.

Historically speaking, childbirth has always been kind of that crucible. I was reading that in Hungary where, even though they’ve incentivized women having as many children as possible, the birth rate has actually plummeted. Young women are looking at the state of affairs and leaving the country. The same with Korea (birth rates this year are now up slightly from previous years). It’s a reaction to that level of patriarchy. When you look around, on a global scale, where people are supported in having children and where they’re not, it seems like the countries where there’s the least amount of support, there’s also the most amount of pressure for women to have lots and lots of babies.

I don’t know if you know about Tia Levings. She was an evangelical Christian mother and had lots of kids. She wrote a book about her escape from that life, and she talks about how it’s this enticing trap, that the most incredible thing you can do as a woman is have a baby.

We need more babies because it supports our economy, but at the same time, we’re not going to give you any money or any support to have those children. It’s a strange sort of hypnotism to make us feel like the most important things we can do as women is to have children, and if we don’t, there’s something wrong.

I really wanted to have a baby, but I hadn’t realized that you’re just walking into another sort of chamber of pain and difficulty, and you unlock this whole other area of repression.

It’s interesting how this is reflected in film. Barbie was on TV the other day, and I ended up just rewatching part of it. I think it’s been a little over a year from the time it was first released; it’s completely flipped. The big speech in the middle about the impossibility of being women, of answering to all these very different and contradictory demands. Now we’re living in the horror movie version Barbie.

One of the greatest exports of America is film. And they’re incredibly potent and convincing depictions and creations of character. So it is with Barbie and that speech in the middle. Everything that she’s saying in that scene is true, but at the same time you’re also being dropped into a world of perfect, idealized beauty.

It goes back to the trad wives with me, where there’s a very prescriptive culture in America, a way of looking at women. Even when it’s a woman going through a difficult time, she’s still going to be beautiful, or she’s still going to be behaving properly, she’s never going to get an abortion, all of these things that you kind of realize, it’s incredibly conservative.

Barbie was a really amazing way of looking into that, because obviously it was so successful, and so many women watched it and loved it and felt really seen by that speech, but at the same time it’s like, “Oh no, they’ve wrapped that up in this really neat thing that is also telling us this is how we should look and behave and be.”

I love Greta Gerwig, I love Margot Robbie and I thought Barbie was great film, but rebranding Barbie into a feminist icon is just absolutely insane to me.

And that was the thing that I found with Witches. I was watching all these films that portrayed women as evil and bad, [and] they always ended with the bad woman being killed. While I was watching them, I was thinking [the bad woman] is who I want to be.

It feels like a bit of a poison apple. On the outside, it’s very beautiful and shiny and perfect, and on the inside, there’s all kinds of this stuff that you imbibe before you’ve fully realized it.

A lot of the film clips in in your film are from the 1960s and ’70s films, films that I grew up on, and even televisions shows like Bewitched. I remember as a little kid watching that show and being utterly confounded because Samantha, who had all these powers, had to put up with her nagging, pain-in-the-ass husband.

I really love Bewitched and I think Elizabeth Montgomery was amazing. The whole thing about Bewitched was that it was a response to the fact that women in the ’60s wanted more power, more agency, and they wanted to be in the workplace. So, it was like women were finding this power, and they don’t know how to deal with it.

That was something that I found looking at the European witch trials, where almost 50,000 women were killed, and you realize the exact same puritanism and control is still here. It’s just been dressed in different ways. And I think there is a comfort in that for people.

Further to what you were just saying about women policing each other. In some ways, it can be far more severe than what men do to women. It’s like the stuff that you get from your friends, or your family, is far more impactful because it’s coming from the people who are closest to you.

Gossip has historically been something that women are derided for. It’s like a stupid thing that silly women do, but gossip has been something that women do to protect each other. You say to each other, watch out for that guy. That’s a big reason why they wanted to kill midwives because midwives knew everyone’s secrets. They knew who had impregnated who and how it happened.

I think the problem about policing is that women do want to share and look out for each other and talk about the things that we’re thinking and feeling, but we’re scared to do it. We have this massive, huge threat that we’re living with every day, which is the patriarchy.

Another successful thing that the patriarchy has done is to break down the way that women would talk to each other, if they felt like they weren’t being watched. I found that in the motherly love group [a support group for postpartum mothers], where women just didn’t give a fuck anymore because we were all teetering on the edge of doing terrible things to ourselves or to our children.

When you get to that place, it’s very liberating because you’re like, “Well, I don’t care if everyone knows that I’m thinking about this, because it’s going to be way worse when I actually do it. So, what’s the problem with me talking about it?”

That’s why it was such a liberating and helpful space. Just talking about it helps.

‘Witches’ screens in Vancouver at the Cinematheque as part of the Frames of Mind mental health film series on March 19 at 7 p.m. Presented in partnership with the Pacific Postpartum Society, a post-screening discussion moderated by Dr. Harry Karlinsky features Dr. Deirdre Ryan, a clinical associate professor at the University of British Columbia’s department of psychiatry. The Tyee is a community partner. Culture editor Dorothy Woodend and Weekender editor Jackie Wong will be in attendance.