“This film should be in everybody’s homes. It should be super accessible. Our absolute goal would be a streamer like Netflix,” actor-turned-filmmaker Pippa Bennett-Warner (Gangs of London) tells me of her ideal destination for her directorial debut 22+1, which screened this week at the London Film Festival.
It isn’t uncommon for me to hear such declarations from a filmmaker, but Bennett-Warner and her creative partner, Pippa Vosper, are fueled by a unique set of ambitions.
22+1 is a short project, penned by Bennett-Warner and Vosper alongside screenwriter Kefi Chadwick (Rivals). Vosper, a veteran writer and fashion editor, also produced and created the original idea. The story is inspired by research Vosper conducted for her 2022 book Beyond Grief: Navigating the Journey of Pregnancy and Baby Loss, written after her son Axel died after being born at 20 weeks in 2017.
“400 women became the subjects of research papers for my book,” Vosper explains. “And the more I spoke to people around the country, the more similarities I was finding with the women of color who were presenting stories that were just too similar to be coincidental.”
Indeed, across the UK, Black women are more than twice as likely to die in childbirth compared with their white counterparts, while babies born to Black mothers are at an acutely increased risk of stillbirth. In the U.S., Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women, according to the CDC. That’s where 22+1 begins, with Ruby, played by Bennett-Warner, attempting to navigate the grief of late-term pregnancy loss while experiencing the underlying racism in the health system.
Vosper explains that she felt a responsibility to bring her findings to light, but knew she couldn’t solely carry the story as a white woman.
“I had to find the right person who we could work alongside, so I could give the baby loss narrative to somebody who could hold it sacredly, but also tell it from a stats and a reality point of view,” Vosper says.
That’s when she tapped Bennett-Warner, who starred in the Sky crime drama Gangs of London, See How They Run (2022), and the recent Netflix thriller The Woman in Cabin 10.
“Pippa called me up one day and said, ‘I think you should direct the film.’ 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, a friend of mine, wrote an original song and composed the score. Francine Leach was my editor, and she absolutely knocked it out of the park. I had the opportunity to work with Oliver Tarney, a five-time Academy Award-nominated sound designer. It has been the most brilliant creative process.”
Vosper notes that she and her team raised funds for the project over four years. Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli’s EON Productions is a co-producer on the project alongside Pip Pip Productions. Vosper was the lead producer, and her company, 3A Productions, is the full rights holder. In her first go as a film producer, Vosper says the process was one of the most satisfying of her career, but she has also been quietly surprised by “moments of misogyny” throughout the process.
“That’s the only thing I’ve been surprised by, and I’ve been in the magazine territory for so long. I started at i-D magazine with Edward Enninful back in the day, that’s how long I’ve been in it,” she says.
The film was screened for a group of the UK’s top health officials, including Kate Brintworth, the Chief Midwifery Officer for England, at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital ahead of the LFF. The NHS, the UK’s publicly funded healthcare system, has now enquired about acquiring the film as an internal training resource.
“We’re now working out a way for this to happen so the film can serve as a training tool for maternity services,” Vosper says.
The film team has also been contacted by UK Health Secretary Wes Streeting.
“It’s now a matter of when we’re going to do a screening in Parliament,” Vosper explains. “We’re also talking to Baroness Amos, whom we met a couple of weeks ago. She’s leading the investigation right now into maternal trauma, focusing on Black and mixed heritage discrepancies and disparities within the maternity services. She has ideas of how we can work together when the investigation is finished in the spring.”
Vosper and Bennett-Warner now have their eyes on “territory expansion,” with the aim of using the story to highlight how the same issues affect healthcare systems across the world.
“If we can show this film on a streaming platform or a terrestrial channel, it will allow people to understand what’s happening, and that is what we want for the story,” Vosper concludes.
LFF ends tomorrow, October 19.
