New Life

A story of love, grief and the courage to walk through death into rebirth.

A documentary project by Bernadette Weber & myself

2022 - ongoing

New Life is an ongoing project I’ve been weaving into being hand in hand with my dear friend Bernadette. Born as a documentary, over the years it has become the magnifying glass of my own inner process and healing journey. It tells the intimate story of my second son’s brief but luminous existence, the choice I had to make to set him free before he could meet this world, and the path he opened within me, through grief, into love, to rebirth.

About

At first, everything felt perfect. My pregnancy was light, full of joy. I wrote to my baby every day, sang to him, dreamt of the moment I would hold him in my arms. Then, one February day, everything changed. A routine ultrasound, a diagnosis, a choice no mother ever wants to make.

I gave birth to him knowing he would not take his first breath.
I held him. I let him go.
Something in me died with him. Yet, at the same time, something in me was born.

This film is my way of honoring Life, honoring him, and honoring all the mothers and families who have walked this path in silence. So many of us carry this experience alone, feeling unseen and unheard.

By telling this story, I hope to break the silence. To hold a space where grief can be witnessed, where pain can be transformed into love, where death can be seen as part of life, and life as something infinite, ever-renewing.

New Life also weaves the story of my grandmother, whose own unspoken pain was carried across generations, and who passed away as I was living my own loss. The film becomes a dialogue between us, between past and present, between grandmother and granddaughter, between those who came before and those who are yet to come.

My note

This film is about love and grief. About the alchemy of pain and compassion. About the strength and courage it takes to face the darkness, embrace the pain, and learn how to hold it as a way to heal and transform it into more love.

It is my invitation for you to open your heart and feel deeply. Honor the cycles of life and death that shape us. Remember that every ending carries the seed of a beginning.

New Life is for every parent who has lost a child, for every person who has faced heart-breaking grief, and for every heart that longs to be reminded that pain can be turned into love and that every death is the starting point of a new birth.

Directors’ note

“I have rarely in my life been so inspired as when I saw Anna coping with her baby's fate and with her own decision to let him go. Her exceptional spiritual faculties, her rationality and strength when she decided that she would not bring someone into a world that would mean pain and struggle, and all the love she kept developing for this "new life", which she decided to embrace and carry with her throughout all her time. Anna has been an inspiration to me, and I believe she can be it for so many more.”