PREGNANT PAUSE

NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS The award-winning adolescent abortion drama…

Ithink the film is so much about friendship and unspoken trauma,” says Eliza Hittman, talking up her new film Never Rarely Sometimes Always. The Brooklyn-born director’s third movie, following It Felt Like Love and Beach Rats, it tells of Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), a pregnant 17 year-old who travels with her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) to New York, where she can get an abortion without parental consent.

The idea first flickered back in 2012, when Hittman read about the death of Savita Halappanavar, an Indian woman living in Ireland who was denied a lifesaving abortion and passed away. “I was really stunned by that,” says Hittman. She then discovered women regularly fly from Ireland to London to legally get an abortion before travelling back home on the same day. “And I thought, ‘That’s a journey that’s untold.’”

Hittman initially wrote a story about two foreign au pairs in Ireland, one becoming pregnant, but abandoned the script in favour of something closer to home. “I started to think about what is the U.S. version of that story and began reading about the journey women take in the United States from rural areas to urban areas to access reproductive

care.” Abortion may be a constitutional right in America, but certain stateimplemented laws “make it virtually impossible for women to access care”.

But it was only after Donald Trump was elected in 2016 that Hittman picked the project back up. “I felt that women’s reproductive rights would be under