Chicago Filmmaker Skewers Lack Of Paid Maternity Leave In New Doc

By Kate Shepherd in News on Dec 23, 2015 6:54PM

zeroweeks.com

Chicago-based documentary filmmaker Ky Dickens is tackling American companies' notoriously stingy paid maternity leave policies in a new film, titled Zero Weeks.

The issue is personal for Dickens, who only received two weeks of paid maternity leave from the film production company where she'd worked for 11 years after the birth of her daughter, according to the Tribune.

Now running her own production company, Yellow Wing Productions, she made a film that follows families who are struggling to care for family members, whether they are infants, aging parents, sick parents, with very little or no paid time off.

It's an important issue that affects everyone but doesn't get very much attention. Dickens hopes "Zero Weeks" will raise awareness.

"Paid leave is an issue that affects every single person," she told the Tribune. "If you are ever going to get sick or injured, if you ever need knee surgery, if you have parents who are going to age, this is an issue that impacts you. So many people think this is just a new parents issue or a working mom issue, and it's not."

The U.S. is far behind the rest of the world on paid leave, according to Dickens. Papua New Guinea is the only other country that doesn't offer citizens paid maternity leave benefits. Great Britain offers an amazing 40 weeks of paid maternity leave and Ireland and Vietnam offer 26 weeks.

"We're talking to agents of change, grass-roots leaders, CEOs of big companies, small business owners, medical professionals," she told the Tribune. "And everyone we talk to says economically, politically, from a business standpoint, from the sheer right-thing-to-do standpoint, it's just good policy."

She's hoping to release the film in 2016, a presidential election year, and is raising money on Kickstarter.