We’re Not Sending Everyone a Streaming Link. That’s Intentional.
Why we’re building something they can’t filter, label, or shut down.
Two weeks ago, we made No Country for Mothers available for community screenings. We now have over 1,000 moms and supporters who have signed up to host a screening across all 50 states. There are more than nearly 300 watch parties already on the calendar for folks to attend.
Fifty states. In two weeks. Feel the weight of that. Because it tells us everything about where mothers are right now, and what they are hungry for.
And it all flows from a choice a lot of people didn’t understand at first.
When the film was ready, we didn’t put it on a streaming platform like Netflix or YouTube. We didn’t send out a link to the public. We didn’t make it easy to watch alone on your couch on a Tuesday night. We made it available only through community screenings — events, watch parties, gatherings — hosted by real people in real places.
And the question we’ve heard over and over is: why?
Here’s the answer. And I want you to sit with it.
The Way We Distribute This Film Is the Message
We live in a moment when the forces working against mothers are not just legislative. They are cultural and algorithmic. DEI programs are being dismantled. ERGs are being quietly shuttered. The content that gets through to us is filtered. And when it isn’t filtered, it gets labeled. Dismissed.
Remember when mothers started speaking out around ICE deportations and suddenly we were all just crazy “wine moms”? That’s not a punchline. That’s a strategy. Make women look hysterical. Make their rage look like a personality flaw. Send them back inside.
We are not going back inside.
But we also cannot fight this battle on their terms — on platforms they control, through algorithms they can tune, in comment sections designed to exhaust us. We have to build something they cannot touch.
And what they cannot touch is a room full of people who have looked each other in the eye.
Film Screening at Rooftop Cinema in Chicago | Photo Credit: Bloom
This is why community screening is not a workaround. It is the strategy.
This is all a part of the Moms First American Motherhood Tour. The Moms First team has been on the road since last week. After we premiered the film in New York, we hit Minneapolis and Chicago and we’re headed to Washington D.C. on July 15 and San Francisco in September. But the tour is not us. The tour is all of you.
In the two weeks since we made the film available, the hosts who’ve hosted watch parties have been every kind of mother: first-timers and grandmothers, working-class moms and executives, moms from communities that rarely see themselves in the same conversation, people who aren’t even parents but see how the system is rigged against families. Different ZIP codes, different backgrounds, different lived experiences. United by one thing: the conviction that the mothers in their lives needed to be in a room together.
Those hosts are not all hosting the same type of events and that’s exactly the point. Some are converting their regular book club. Some are setting up projectors in their backyards on summer evenings. Some are bringing it to their workplace ERGs and their colleagues. Preschools are screening it for staff. Perinatal professionals are sharing it with their patients. Librarians are putting it on the community calendar. Single moms groups are booking a community center room — and the room next door for childcare — so that no mother has to choose between showing up and taking care of her kids.
And then there’s de’Angelo Dia from The Independent Picture House in Charlotte, NC and Gordon Delgiorno who runs the Wilmington Delaware International Film Festival. Two guys who saw this film and thought: my community needs to see this.
There are large auditoriums convening political leaders to sit in a room, view the film, and hear their constituents’ stories — not filtered through a policy brief, but raw and real, the way mothers actually live them.
Here Is What I Know About Isolation
The system — the one that leaves mothers without paid leave, without affordable childcare, without legal protection when they’re laid off during pregnancy — that system does not just operate through policy. It operates through shame. It works by making every mother feel that her struggle is private. Personal. Evidence of some individual failure to manage, to plan, to hold it together.
That is a lie. And you cannot discover that it’s a lie by watching a film alone.
You discover it in a room. When the lights come up and the woman next to you is crying and you realize she has been carrying the same thing you have been carrying and she thought it was just her, too. That is the moment everything changes. Shame becomes solidarity. Self-blame becomes fury. But it’s the right kind of fury, the kind that moves in the right direction. A fury at the manufactured division, not at each other.
A screening is not just a film. It is a crack in the isolation. And when enough cracks appear at the same time, across all 50 states, in living rooms and backyards and auditoriums and workplaces, they break open a movement.
Watch parties come in all formats and flavors. Brittani Cotton (top, left) took over a cinema in Astoria, NY (her recap is a must-read). Hannah Bryant (bottom, right) kept it intimate with a backyard soiree and living room screening. Elizabeth Andrews (bottom, left) brought tech leaders together at mHUB. And Loryn Duke (top, right), along with Routt Thrive By Five and Steamboat for All, filled a room in Steamboat Springs, CO with 50 diverse community members who showed up and felt every moment.
This Is How Culture Shifts
Society does not change through a viral moment or through a tweak to an algorithm. It changes when people gather, talk, and refuse to go back to pretending things are fine.
Our daughters and granddaughters are watching what we do right now. The people in our lives who are not mothers — partners, neighbors, colleagues, elected officials — they need to be in the room, too. This is going to take all of us.
And you don’t need a big event to make a lasting impact. You just need a date, a link, and your people.
Everything you need to get started to host a watch party, to be a part of shifting the culture around motherhood, is right here on our Host Hub.
Gather. Watch. Discuss. Mobilize.
That is how this ends differently.
Screenings Happening Near You
Nearly 300 No Country for Mothers watch parties are already on the books nationwide, with more added every day. Find one near you or host your own:
- Boise, ID July 8, 6-8 PM at Library at Hillcrest — RSVP
- Asheville, NC, July 9, 5:15-7:30PM at East Asheville Public Library — RSVP
- Annapolis, MD, July 9, 6-9PM at AND Creative Gallery — RSVP
- Whitefish Bay, WI , July 10, 10AM-12PM at Whitefish Bay Public Library — RSVP
- Lowell, MA, July 11, 4:30-6:30pm at Lowell Community Charter School — RSVP
- Grimes, IA, July 12, 2-3:30 PM at Grimes Public Library — RSVP
Join Us in DC on July 15 | 5-8PM
Moms First is hosting a screening of No Country for Mothers followed by a panel discussion with leading voices in this movement. Together, we’ll dig into what this moment means for mothers across America and what comes next.
If you’re in the Washington, DC area, we want you there. Register by July 10.
Your Watch Party Just Got a Soundtrack
We put together an official No Country for Mothers playlist on Spotify, and it’s exactly the vibe you need. From Aretha Franklin and Beyonce to Stevie Wonder and Tom Petty, we’re bringing the vibes.
Hit play before your screening and let the music do the rest.
Check out what people are saying about Moms First in the news:
- Women Leaders Talk Wealth, Wellness, And Influence At The WIE Suite’s New Guard Summit (Black Enterprise)
- Inside Politics with Dana Bash (CNN)
- How Motherhood Was Established ‘to Keep Us Powerless’ — and How Moms Can Change That (She Knows)
- Reshma Saujani on a growing national movement to reunite moms across divisions (Playing With Fire)
This Fourth of July, I’m not celebrating what is — I’m celebrating what we’re building together. The communities we are forging, one screening at a time.
See you on tour,
