Filmmaker Emmai Alaquiva’s latest documentary, “The Ebony Canal,” distills the devastating data about Black maternal health into a touching narrative about the many women behind the headlines.

Narrated by Academy Award-winning icon Viola Davis, the film has already earned an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Short Form Documentary and two Emmy Awards.

This project asks viewers to confront a crisis that Black women, families, and advocates have sounded the alarm on for years: The United States is one of the most dangerous developed nations for childbirth among Black women.

“My mission is to help change the trajectory for future generations through the vessel of storytelling,” says Alaquiva to BET. “This is not work that can be done alone; it requires all of us.”

It's a message that resonates especially this week during this year's Black Maternal Health Week (April 11-17). In addition to Davis, the director collaborated with several voices and creatives for the film. Viewers hear the real stories of Alana Yzola Daly, Larissa Lane, Mariah Peoples, and Rachel Strader, with voices and contributions from author and birthFUND founder, Elaine Welteroth, Kamala Harris, and Keke Palmer.

For Welteroth, the project is deeply personal. “In my first pregnancy, I understood intimately for the first time how women become these statistics,” she tells BET. “And it was really jarring for me to see just how broken the maternal healthcare system is.” Though it was through learning about midwives that her birth experience was transformed. 

Welteroth says the film is part of her larger mission with birthFUND, the nonprofit she founded to help families access midwifery care and remove financial barriers to safer, more dignified births.

“We see so many fear-mongering stories about Black mothers dying at extraordinary rates and being mistreated. We're seeing it all over the internet right now,” she says. “It's so important that we balance out that narrative with examples of what safe, beautiful, sacred, respectful, dignified births look like, and to remind people that they have a pathway to those experiences that are full of joy, full of empowerment, and delivered at the hands of midwives.”

Welteroth also stressed how awareness without solutions can lead to burnout. It’s a sentiment at the root of “The Ebony Canal,”— how to remain hopeful in the midst of grief.

“It’s been incredibly meaningful to stand alongside Viola Davis and advocates like Charles Johnson, Kimberly Seals Allers, and Elaine Welteroth, whose leadership through BirthFUND is helping us all to reimagine safer, healthier outcomes for families everywhere,” Alaquiva says.

That emphasis on solutions matters because many younger audiences are flooded with graphic health content online and may be more likely to scroll past another tragic headline. “The Ebony Canal” interrupts that cycle. Instead of asking viewers to look away, it asks them to look directly at the human cost of medical bias and then consider what safer care could look like.

Per the Associated Press, Black women in the U.S. died at a rate nearly 3.5 times higher than white women around childbirth in 2023, even as the overall maternal mortality rate dropped from the prior year. Roughly 669 women died from childbirth that same year. Excessive bleeding, blood vessel blockages, and infections were among the leading causes of death.

“It's a system failure that fails all moms. This is not an issue that only affects Black women. This is a systemic failure that impacts all women, and it just disproportionately impacts Black women, just like every other issue in this country, because of systemic racism and medical bias,” Welteroth says.

She understands, with great nuance, that this is an issue that should raise alarm with everyone and shares that, “it's going to take everybody to fix it.” 

For Alaquiva, this project is equally personal: it began after the director was asked by the Richard King Mellon Foundation and the August Wilson African American Cultural Center to create a film centered on Black maternal and infant health. Little did he know what he’d soon uncover within his own familial ties.

“I was unaware of just how urgent and alarming this crisis truly is,” Alaquiva says. “But discovering that my own mother faced complications carrying me, and that my wife lost her twin at birth, transformed this work into something deeply personal.”

The six-time Emmy Award-winning filmmaker called the film his “love letter to Black and Brown women across the world, honoring their resilience, their stories, and their lives.”

What gives the documentary its urgency is not just the statistics. It is the way those numbers have names, families, and consequences. 

“I just hope it helps people see black women as human,” Welteroth says. “Not superhuman, not subhuman, but tender, fragile, beautiful, complex humans that are worthy of protection, and the same for our babies and our birth experiences.”

To learn more about The Ebony Canal and how to watch, click here.