Press

A Midwife’s Tale

"This 'American Experience' special deals not with history writ large, but with the daily events in the last 27 years of one hardworking 18th and early 19th-century woman's life, chronicled by her in a series of notebooks, and brought to the world at large by an intrepid 20th century historian......[W]here else would we learn that, in his late 70s, Martha's husband, Ephraim, was committed to debtor's prison (where he spent 17 months) -- not because he failed to pay his own taxes, but because he was not assiduous enough in collecting them from others."
Barbara D. Phillips, The Wall Street Journal 

"This Tale sheds light on the poorly documented world of women, giving traditional history new dimensions and color."
Time Out New York

"Best Historical Drama of 1997: local filmmakers Richard Rogers and Laurie Kahn-Leavitt's A Midwife's Tale, an inventive and experimental way to make the American past breathe life.  Spielberg really should have taken a look before trying to do Amistad."
Gerald Peary , The Boston Phoenix

"'I really liked the project, and when I met with [Director] Dick [Rogers] we really hit it off,' [Director of Photography, Steven] Poster says. 'To me, it was very exciting to do this small, 16 mm film.  I like having the opportunity to do good, quality films; it's real art.'  [Peter] Stein was equally enamored of the project.  'This is one of the films I'm most proud to have worked on,' he says.  'It's a project filled with integrity.
Rogers: 'For me, the whole issue was not to make a romantic vision, but something natural, with a respect for the existing light, which consisted mostly of firelight, a few candles, and whatever light came into the settings from outside.'”
Brooke Comber, American Cinematographer 

"'A Midwife's Tale' is an intriguing study of efforts to reconstruct early American domestic life using diaries kept by a Maine woman from 1785 to 1812.  The journals were left by Martha Ballard, a midwife who was an ancestor of Clara Barton."
TV Guide 

" Director Richard P. Rogers endows the film with a timeless, universal quality by the beauty of the lighting and photography and elegance of the sound design.  He and director of photography Peter Stein create images that seem transposed from paintings by Vermeer, Chardin, or Wyeth….
A Midwife's Tale is a film of almost tactile pleasure and keen intelligence -- a rare combination."
Betsy Sherman, The Boston Globe

"[S]talwart Kaiulani Lee, who plays Ballard brings compelling gravity to the sometimes harsh, sometimes mundane events, which touch on still-hot issues of race, class, religion, and gender."
Ken Eisner, Variety

"As a whole it is a conscientious, often moving effort to flesh out the woman from the diary's cryptic, sometimes puzzling words and to carry us back into an America that labored under pioneering rigors."
Walter Goodman, The New York Times

"The film is anchored by actress Kaiulani Lee's subtle underplaying of the stoic-seeming Ballard.  Lee is aided and abetted by Richard P. Rogers's skillful direction and a supporting ensemble cast that illuminates and enlivens a distant past."
Bruce McCabe, Boston Sunday Globe

"Kahn-Leavitt, a Watertown resident, has gotten fan mail and e-mail from all over the world and admits she didn't expect to change people's lives with this film."
Nicole Bishop, Cambridge Chronicle

"'I think Laurie (Kahn-Leavitt) has created for herself an extraordinary challenge....This is kind of Merchant-Ivory-plus.'"
Karen Everhart Bedford, Current

"This American Experience video is everything one could hope for in a historical film.  Laurie Kahn-Leavitt and Richard P. Rogers have put together a very classy production that does exactly what public history should do: it informs the public about how historians craft the stories of history at the same time as it informs us about life in a time and a place quite different from our own.  The production bears witness to what can be accomplished when a skilled historian is matched with equally skilled filmmakers, designers, and actors.
Alison Duncan Hirsch,The Public Historian