A film about divine intervention and freedom from shame.
THELMA™
SAVED MY LIFE
In this fantastical retelling of Maya Golden Bethany’s 2023 memoir, The Return Trip, a first-time mom struggling with postpartum depression enacts a suicide plan as her dissenting inner voice takes the form of her son’s favorite kids' program character. A stylized personal narrative that highlights a different kind of “Texas” story: one where Black mothers are fully realized human beings and postpartum health is differentiated as a portal into self-realization.
“We rarely see the level of endurance it takes to be a mother with active mental health issues. With THELMA™️ SAVED MY LIFE, I challenge the notion of what resiliency looks like. Maya is at what seems like the end of her rope; she has ZERO energy to give to anyone but herself because of the pile-on of unaddressed trauma in combination with the chemical imbalance in her body after having a child. ”
Living what feels like a double life, Maya, a young Black ‘super mom’, finds herself in a pattern of avoidance and anger surrounding her issues with postpartum depression, addiction, and suicidal ideation.
Fatigued...dissociative...and emotionally checked out from the needs of her autistic son and devoted husband, Maya’s postpartum fatigue reaches a new low. Under the guise of a family road trip, she makes a plan to end her misery, placing her family in an increasingly dangerous situation.
The only person who can stop her? Every mother’s nightmare. A dancing, purple-furred kids' program character who WILL NOT. STOP. SINGING.
“Now is the right time for a project like THELMA™ SAVED MY LIFE because we are deep in the midst of one of the most critical reproductive justice periods of United States History. In 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned, marking the steady erosion of necessary healthcare for women and birthing individuals.
Without the protections of Roe v. Wade, mothers from already underserved groups face further obstacles to care.
Not only are Black women one of the most under-treated groups for depression in the U.S., but “over 50% of postpartum depression cases in women of color go unreported (MMHLA, 2024).”
The words unreported and untreated immediately raise alarm bells in my head.
It tells me that if this project does not move forward, we further push the narrative that it is okay to let Black women, who already face healthcare disparities, live in isolation. Isolation and loneliness are directly related to self-harm and suicide, with nearly two-thirds — that’s about 65% to over 80%, depending on the specific window — of pregnancy-related and maternal deaths in the United States occurring during the postpartum period.
Homicide and suicide account for a significant share of maternal and postpartum deaths (New England Journal of Medicine).
I fear the less we talk about postpartum depression, the more likely we are to see suicide-related deaths in first-time moms.
This year alone marked the surprise death of actress Hayden Panettiere, whose addiction is suspected to have been exacerbated by her untreated postpartum depression. If Panettiere, a white female celebrity, could fall victim to the effects of postpartum depression, imagine the number of unseen maternal deaths related to postpartum depression in low-income communities of color residing in “red” states like Texas.”
~Bev Chukwu, Writer & Director of THELMA™ SAVED MY LIFE
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
BEV CHUKWU
Beverly “Bev” Chukwu is a Nigerian American writer, director, script consultant, and the Executive Director of Ayagozie Productions. Her projects have screened at the African Film Festival Atlanta, Women in Horror Film Festival, Cine Las Americas, AGLIFF, and more. Along with her achievements as a filmmaker, including a “Best First-Time Director” award at the Portland New Alternative Voices Festival, Bev’s screenplay PRINCE OF LAVENDALE STREET was the feature winner in the 2021 BlueCat Screenplay Competition, and her video essay “Sometimes Black” is now used as educational material at the University of Texas at Austin. Before transitioning into film, Bev spent over four years in various mental health arenas, including providing behavioral therapy for children and adults on the autism spectrum.
Bev has received fellowships from the Black List x WIF Episodic Lab; Google’s YouTube Originals Black Voices Creator Program, which also provided financial support for her award-winning narrative short film “Princess”; and the James A. Michener Center for Writers, where she received an MFA in screenwriting and fiction. Bev writes character-driven speculative (sci-fi, fantasy, horror) narratives that lean into the uncanny and explore themes of assimilation, technological dysphoria, and mental health for people of the Black diaspora.
