Gulbadan, a midwife in Afghanistan, bathes one of her small children. She runs an obstetric clinic and assists pregnant women in remote parts of the country. In this scene from The Delivery Line, though, she is simply at home.
She slowly eases a baby into the basin, his little feet meeting the water, then uses what appears to be a small watering can to pour warm water over him. The music comes in softly. It keeps the moment intimate without making it sweeter than it already is. Outside that tenderness, the pressure remains: Taliban control makes it difficult to reach nearby cities and essential resources.
With The Delivery Line, Nance Ackerman follows five midwives: Ximena in Mexico, Maria in Colombia, Gulbadan in Afghanistan, Hamsatu in Nigeria, and Jay in Canada. They work in places touched by war, displacement, poverty, and neglect, but The Delivery Line is not heavy in the way that description might suggest. Filmed over eight years, it is patient, careful, and often very beautiful. It finds hope in childbirth, but does not ask hope to solve anything.
Ackerman stays longer in some places than in others, but none of these settings is merely background. Ximena works near migrant encampments along the US-Mexico border, including with women who have fled Honduras. Hamsatu reaches Nigerian communities with scarce resources and the threat of Boko Haram in the region. Gulbadan works under Taliban rule. Maria moves through Colombian neighborhoods marked by criminal violence and conflicts between police and criminal groups. In Toronto, Jay cares for women who are unhoused, dealing with substance use issues, or both.
Ximena visits pregnant women in makeshift encampments near the US border. She enters tents where there is barely enough space to sit, much less perform a prenatal exam. She checks blood pressure, offers medication, answers questions, and makes sure the women are not left alone afterward. The tent is small, and The Delivery Line makes viewers feel that. Yet, it does not make a spectacle of the space.
Ackerman often films from very near. The camera is close enough to catch hesitation on a face, a hand pausing, a body shifting before anyone says much. It stays with faces, pregnant bellies, hands, and small silences, but it does not press for more. Even in close-up in the room is still there: a wall too near, a bed, a plastic chair, someone waiting just outside the frame. When the camera pulls back, the wider shot brings back the tent, the clinic, the neighborhood. The private moment is never sealed off from its surroundings.
Hamsatu and Maria carry a similar steadiness. Their presence is maternal, grounded in experience rather than sentiment. They know what to do because they have done it many times. They have learned how to respond to fear with calm. Some of that knowledge is medical. Some of it is harder to name: listening, waiting, reading a room, holding the hand of a woman in labor.
Rooms are cramped, tents are thin, and clinics lack medical necessities. The Delivery Line does not try to make that lack look noble. It leaves it there, in the space, while the midwives work inside it. They arrive with bags, tools, medication, questions, and a kind of calm that has clearly been practiced. The score stays low, and sometimes the practical sounds matter more: water, fabric, footsteps, breathing, voices kept steady because panic would not help anyone.
Women enter rooms, tents, clinics, and neighborhoods; they listen, touch, examine, wait, and carry. The places begin to connect because the work keeps returning. A hand steadies a pregnant woman. A woman is examined. Someone waits for pain to pass, or for labor to begin, or for fear to settle enough that the next thing can be done. Someone arrives, checks, waits, holds a hand. Then someone does it again.
The brightness in these complicated situations is seen in the midwives’ return. The Delivery Line is a beautiful and deeply humane documentary that does not turn the hardship these women endure into spectacle. The film returns to you, just as the midwives return, no matter the circumstances, to the women they care for.