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Overlooked & Underrated Docs & Features
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First Comes Love: Nina Davenport’s Single Motherhood
Preamble: I approach this film with a strong bias. I admire human vulnerability, the willing to self-disclose. For instance, Joni Mitchell’s songwriting of the 1960s and 1970s. Or when Craig Ferguson—host of the CBS late night show, “The Late Show with Craig Ferguson”—addressed Britney Spears’s bald-headed meltdown of years back. In his show’s introductory monolog Ferguson expressed his displeasure with the massive media coverage of the young singer’s troubles.
He reflected on his own comedic exploitation of the troubled behavior of celebrities; and he went on to describe in dramatic detail his own struggles with alcoholism. I’d never seen anything like that before on television. That one experience changed my approach to satire—I now avoid the satirizing of performers, opting instead for that of politicians and others who create and oversee a corrupt world.
Nina Davenport is a career documentary filmmaker. At the age of 41, having struggled and failed to find a husband, she decided to have a baby on her own. Thank goodness , of course, that there was a bit of a ‘village’ around her in form of good friends. Davenport made the understandable decision to cover this deeply personal journey with the least expensive filmmaker she could find—herself. So, she gave birth to a beautiful baby and to “First Comes Love,”, a warm, touching story in which she makes herself exceptionally vulnerable
Davenport covers the entire journey, from the initial exploration of the idea, through in vitro fertilization, childbirth, and the self and the world she found after this profound decision. I admire the filmmakers of the documentaries I cover, and that admiration is doubled for this filmmaker who so courageously gave us a window to her struggles and triumphs.
“First Comes Love” is an HBO documentary cablecast the summer of 2013. Go to the film’s website to find other ways to see the film.