What Babies Want was the documentary feature that we saw at the Newport Beach Film Festival. The title sums up the subject pretty well; the film is about prenatal and very early postnatal influences on child development, with a heavy emphasis on birth and the events immediately following delivery. The film has a definite "hippie" slant, being generally in favor of home birth and alternatives to "traditional" hospital birthing procedures. I would imagine that there are any number of people out there who would have problems with the film—indeed, I was not without my own criticisms of the ways in which some of the information was presented—but I was lucky enough to hear the filmmaker say that she considered the movie to be "the beginning of a conversation" rather than the final word, which I think definitely made me more open-minded. Whether or not you buy into the philosophy behind the film—and more and more I'm coming around to such ideas—it was a well-made documentary that presented quite a lot of information in less than an hour.

Viewed: 2005-04-22 | Released: 2004-11-06 | Score: A

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