At Tribeca, a Short Film Revisits the Hidden Roads Women Took Before Roe
“The Dark Knot at the Center,” a 17-minute documentary short by Portuguese filmmaker Inês Pedrosa e Melo, draws from an archive of letters written in the 1960s by women who traveled across the United States to Mexican border towns to obtain underground abortion care.
The film will have its world premiere at the 2026 Tribeca Festival as part of the shorts program “Whatever It Takes.” It screens Sunday, June 7, at 2:30 p.m. at the Shorts Theater at Spring Studios, 50 Varick Street. A second screening is scheduled for Saturday, June 13, at 5:30 p.m., also at the Shorts Theater at Spring Studios. The director and producers are expected to attend both screenings.
Set against the landscapes of the Southwestern United States, “The Dark Knot at the Center” moves through towns in Texas, Arizona, and California, retracing journeys that were often hidden by necessity and preserved through private correspondence. The letters were written to the Society for Humane Abortion, later known as the Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, a San Francisco-based organization that helped connect women to abortion providers before Roe v. Wade.
“I am in bed, about to go to sleep, but I couldn’t go to sleep until I wrote you about my experience,” one woman writes in a line used in the film.
The letters are practical, intimate, and often startlingly direct. They describe distance, cost, fear, secrecy, and relief. They also show women trying to explain their lives in their own words, outside the language of courts, legislatures, and public debate.
Pedrosa e Melo’s film arrives at Tribeca in a post-Dobbs America, where abortion access is again shaped by geography, money, travel and state law. But “The Dark Knot at the Center” does not unfold as a conventional political argument. Its focus is lived experience: what it means to seek care when care has been pushed out of reach.
“Starting in 1966–67, the Society for Humane Abortion, a San Francisco Bay Area organization supporting women’s access to abortion before Roe v. Wade, helped build an underground network of reproductive healthcare providers across towns along the U.S.–Mexico border,” Pedrosa e Melo said in a director’s statement.
More than 700 women wrote to the organization about their experiences. In those letters, the director found accounts of college plans, future professions, unsupportive relationships, financial precarity, fear, resolve, and moments of unexpected joy.
“The Dark Knot at the Center” uses actresses to voice excerpts from the letters while filming in some of the towns those women traveled through. The film becomes both a record of the past and a reminder of how fragile access to reproductive health care can be.
“At this time I am not equipped to have children,” another woman writes. “It may be asked, ‘...then why did you get pregnant in the first place?’ The question may as well be, ‘Why do you become emotionally joyed or sad? Why do you talk, or walk, or live?’”
Pedrosa e Melo is a nonfiction filmmaker, editor, researcher-educator, and Ph.D. student in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Originally from Lisbon, Portugal, she works in hybrid and archival nonfiction cinema, often exploring personal and collective trauma. Her short films have screened across the United States, Europe, and South America. Her film “Home, revised” won the Fernando Lopes Award for Best First Portuguese Film at Doclisboa in 2022.
She was also selected for European Film Promotion’s FUTURE FRAMES program at the 2023 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, was a 2022–23 SFFILM FilmHouse filmmaker-in-residence and is a graduate of Stanford University’s Documentary Film MFA program.
“The Dark Knot at the Center” is produced by Carlos Carneiro, André Guiomar and Luís Costa, with Nicholas Weissman, Kalim Armstrong and Jaime Chew serving as co-producers. Marta Simões is the cinematographer, and the film is edited by Miguel da Santa and Pedrosa e Melo.
The film runs 17 minutes and 38 seconds. It is presented in English, in DCP, color and 5.1 sound.
For Pedrosa e Melo, the film is also about the instability of access across generations.
“The film reflects on how access to reproductive healthcare has never moved in a straight line,” she said, “but in waves of repression and liberation — and on the future we hope not to inherit again.”
No comments:
Post a Comment