Team -

Our Team

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, we are a very small team and are passionate about maternal healthcare and birth justice. Jen’s production company is Forward Films LLC, and this was Jen and Jessica’s first collaboration.

Jen Gilomen is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who has created films distributed on PBS, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon as well as domestic and international film festivals, including UNSETTLED (producer and cinematographer; directed/produced by Tom Shepard; premiered April 2019; over ten film festival awards), LIFE ON THE LINE (PBS, 2014, distributed by New Day Films; UFVA Award, Best Doc at Mexico City International Film Festival), IN MY SHOES (Audience Award, Frameline Film Festival; distributed by Frameline), and DEEP DOWN (Independent Lens, 2010, distributed by New Day Films), which was funded by ITVS and MacArthur Foundation, participated in the U.S. State Department’s American Documentary Showcase, and received a national Emmy® nomination in 2011. In 2015-16, Jen was a Supervising Producer and Programmer at ITVS, where she oversaw a $3 million portfolio of over fifteen feature documentaries. She is an Associate of the U.C. Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program, Member-Owner of New Day Films, co-founder of the Collective of Documentary Women Cinematographers, former board member of Working Films and director at Bay Area Video Coalition, and lives in San Francisco with her wife and daughter. Jen’s current projects, DELIVERING JUSTICE and BORN FOR THIS, were inspired by her own traumatic, near-death experience in childbirth in 2018.

Jessica Jones is an Emmy® nominated documentary filmmaker and editor. Her work focuses on community, cultural representation, and race — uplifting stories around the Black and multiracial experience — through character-driven narratives. She has served as an assistant editor for multiple feature documentaries, such as “A Fragile Trust” (Independent Lens, Dir: Samantha Grant), and “A New Color” (Dir: Mo Morris), and as an editor for work that has appeared on Instagram, the New York Times, KQED, and the BBC. In 2016, she received an Emmy® nomination for “Women Dancers Redefine Oakland’s Street Dancing Scene,” published on KQED Arts. She was the 2011 George Stoney Fellow at Working Films, a 2013 BAVC Mediamaker Fellow, and a part of the 2020 inaugural Re-Take Oakland fellowship program. She is a graduate of Northwestern University, and George Washington University’s Institute for Documentary Filmmaking. Jessica is a new mother who is passionate about Black maternal health. She included the final moments of her birth experience in her recent short film “On the Pulse of Life” created for the Smithsonian’s “Future’s” Exhibit and in partnership with BElovedBIRTH Black Centering.

A FILM BY

Jen Gilomen

DIRECTOR/PRODUCER/

CINEMATOGRAPHER

Jen Gilomen

EDITORS

Jessica Jones

Jen Gilomen

DRONE CINEMATOGRAPHY

Jen Gilomen

FEATURING

Janeé & Josh Washington

Lisa Davis

Davon Crawford

Bria Bailey

Nicole Boutté

Sylvia Washington

ARCHIVAL MATERIALS

Janeé & Joshua Washington & Family

Camerative iStock

MUSIC LICENSING

The Rights Workshop

THANK YOU

Rhi Bell

Sukhesh Miryala

Jessica Gorter

Annie Howell

Nina Davenport

Highland Hospital Labor & Delivery Staff

Eleanor Ajala, Alameda County Health Services

Meredith Fenton & Ainsley Hill
Selina Lewis Davidson

Tanya Smith-Johnson

Linda Jones

Dr. Sayida Peprah-Wilson

Samantha Grant

Pallavi Somusetty

Sally Rubin

Contact the team

We are currently planning for screenings and an impact campaign for Born for This. If you have ideas for us, we’re all ears.

Our Team

Jen Gilomen

jessica Jones

Contact the team