TALA

In a forgotten village where silence is inherited and endurance mistaken for strength, Kiona faces a perilous home birth far from hospitals, thrusting her, her husband Takoda, and the village into a night of fear and reckoning. As women gather—Nanyehi, the seasoned midwife carrying decades of loss, a seventeen-year-old girl trapped in a future she rejects, and the silent wives who know pain as inheritance—they navigate the life-and-death labor that challenges old knowledge and long-held traditions. Outside, men wait, bound by pride and helplessness, as Takoda confronts the limits of love. When Kiona’s child, Tala (“light”), is born, her cry is not triumph but fragile, dangerous hope, questioning what it means to bring life into a world unkind to women. Survival is just the beginning: fever, old beliefs, and urgent realities collide. Women begin to imagine escape; a husband must act; a village faces the cost of unchallenged silence. TALA is a lyrical, unflinching exploration of motherhood, bodily autonomy, generational trauma, and the courage to transform suffering into choice and light.