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A Midwife's Tale

Introduction by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Screening on Film
Directed by Richard Rogers.
US, 1996, 35mm, color, 89 min.

Rogers’s sole dramatic feature is this highly acclaimed adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by historian Laurel Ulrich. A Midwife’s Tale unfolds like a detective story as it recounts the true tale of two women who lived two hundred years apart in time, linked by the massive but cryptic diary one has left behind. The world of frontier midwife and diarist Martha Ballard gradually takes shape as the contemporary author (played by Ulrich herself) pieces together the turbulent decades after the American Revolution in a small Maine town where social turmoil and religious conflict make survival a full-time job.

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From the collection – Satyajit Ray