In the new documentary feature The Cord (Le cordon), French journalist-turned-filmmaker Nolwenn Hervé takes us to Venezuela and inside its “broken health system where life hangs by a thread,” a description of the doc highlights. “Carolina rises as a maternity warrior. Drawing strength from her past, she relentlessly preserves the vital cord between pregnant women and their babies.”
After all, “giving birth has become a life-threatening act” for the underprivileged in the country, the press notes for the film explain. Carolina fights this crisis with seemingly endless energy and the resilience network she has created in her neighborhood, “leading women in the fight for bodily autonomy and safe birthing conditions.” Her vision is to create a space where ancestral practices and Western medicine come together in a community-led model of care and a “place where women reclaim autonomy over their bodies, their births, and their futures.”
The Cord world premieres on Saturday, March 14, in the main competition of CPH:DOX, the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, which runs through March 22. Hervé served as director and cinematographer, with Estelle Robin You producing the doc. Grande Ourse Films is handling sales on the film.
The Cord is one of six films featured in the second edition of Europe Docs!, an online showcase jointly curated by European Film Promotion and CPH:DOX that is designed to put a spotlight on outstanding European documentaries and improve access to the North American market.
Hervé first went to Venezuela in 2016 as a journalist when working on a French TV story on oil smuggling. “Venezuela was already in the middle of a crisis, and I could see Venezuelan women crossing the border to Colombia to give birth safely, because in Venezuela, they were afraid of losing their babies or maybe dying,” she tells THR.
She met a nurse there who introduced her to a hospital in Maracaibo, the second-largest city in the country. “It’s very symbolic, because this is the region that has made Venezuela so rich because of its petrol,” Hervé explains. “And I just found the experience so shocking and crazy when she showed me the conditions in this public hospital. Children were malnourished. And this nurse was also selling candies on the street because she couldn’t afford [life] with her salary.”
She was really “touched, not only as a journalist, but also as a woman,” by what she saw, leading her to embark on the journey of putting together her first feature film. “I wanted to tell this story, but not as a journalist. I wanted to have the freedom of telling the story with a subjective point of view and with an artistic point of view.”
Hervé says she worked on The Cord for more than five years. She first met the doc’s protagonist, Carolina, in 2021 through a Colombian friend. She immediately knew she had found the voice and the heart of The Cord after what she recalls as “a really impactful meeting.”
In line with the maternity warrior’s energy, the film ended up not focusing only on the scary and the negative. “She’s a very good example of how we can try to change things when governments and states just fail, and how solidarity and sisterhood are the only things left to survive,” the filmmaker tells THR. “I am getting goosebumps [when thinking about it]. It was a beautiful lesson for me to see all these women together who are feeling, yes, we’re suffering a lot, but we’re together. And I think this is the most beautiful lesson of this experience, of this journey, for me personally and also for the film.”
One thing that Carolina told Hervé several times is something that the doc maker won’t forget: How the health care expert was proud to be able to make people who are dying laugh. “She’s just full of energy, full of life,” she says.
And that is what makes the story of Carolina a universal one, the filmmaker emphasizes. “I found it to be a metaphor of our world, our capitalist world, which relies on petrol to supposedly grow,” she shares. “We can relate to [Venezuela through] the increase of authoritarianism and conservative [politicians] cutting health budgets. We can also already see the consequences in Western societies. In France, for instance, maternal mortality is increasing.” Concludes Hervé: “I think the message to keep in mind is, ‘let’s stay together and let’s remain solidary’.”
The filmmaker and Carolina became very close throughout the process of creating The Cord. “I became the godmother of Carolina’s youngest daughter,” Hervé shares.
In case you wonder about this, she is aware that one question may come up as people find out about The Cord. “Some people could think I’m French, so what the hell am I doing there in Venezuela?” says Hervé. “It was something much more universal about being women and being together and just talking and experiencing what life and death are.”
