Photography by Emily Hart-Roberts

The BABY! International Film Festival, Presented and Sponsored by the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara was an amazing event. It offered a great opportunity for the community to join together to talk about birth and to envision new possibilities for the way we welcome in our young ones into the world. The films and panel discussions opened us up to new ideas and connections, and offered support and new contacts for families and the organizations that are here to support families. We would like to send out our thanks and appreciation to all of the people who so generously donated time and money to help make this event a success.

As recently featured in the 2008 MOTHERING MAGAZINE, the Baby International Film Festival brings together a diverse array of powerful films, leading experts, and dynamic panel-participants to explore pregnancy, birth and bonding, breastfeeding, and empowered choices regarding these issues. Be informed, be touched, and come away with new possibilities!

Baby! Film Festival Mission

The mission of this festival is to offer positive film images that deepen and expand our sense of trust in pregnancy, birth, and parenting. On a national level there is recognition that women have lost confidence in normal birth. The film festival is an opportunity to actively inspire women to perceive birth in a new light. We are creating a forum where families can find the latest information available about pregnancy, birth and postpartum so they can be empowered to create an experience that will help them thrive as a new family. We believe this type of support from the community helps prevent potential problems during this vulnerable formative period. An ounce of prevention here can leave a legacy for a lifetime.

Our intention is to use the film festival event as networking opportunity for organizations that provide services for families and children. Although film festivals are traditionally one-time events with transient impact on the community, our festival is intentionally a tool for community education, growth and enrichment. We intend to build a mechanism for networking alliances, which will provide long-term communication, referrals and a forum for cooperative efforts into the future. We encourage our networking partners to offer classes and informational seminars around the time of the festival in order to take advantage of the momentum built by the event.

A Quote from Sir R. Bowlby

Disruptive children, drug and alcohol abuse, violence, depression and crime, are problems that usually share a common origin. It is the quality of the earliest attachment relationships formed between parents and their babies that tend to predispose the behaviour of the developing child and emerging adult. There is now overwhelming long-term scientific evidence that points to the first two years of a person's life as the critical period for their personality traits to become established. These patterns of behaviour are wired up in the infant's developing brain, and when they later become parents they will frequently find themselves repeating the experiences of their own childhood with their child.

Baby! Film Festival Networking Partners Benefits:

Networking Partner Involvement:

We ask you to actively partner with us to market the festival to members of your constituencies to encourage their active participation in this event. We will provide you with email and hardcopy postcards as well as film festival posters to display. Advance ticket sales will insure the success of our event and will be available with sale incentives to our networking partners.

 We place a particular emphasis on including young adults and people from all ethnic and racial origins, as we believe that it is through diversity and the voices of all ages that we may come together as a community into a deeper understanding of what it is means to be born.