When a woman returns to rural Georgia to bring her incarcerated niece home to give birth, she is drawn into her family's forgotten legacy of Black midwifery, where generations of grief, love, and resilience converge in a final act of healing.
GREEN THINGS GROW is a poetic Southern drama about Black motherhood, inherited grief, and the sacred work of bringing life into a world that has not always protected it. When Jewel returns to her rural Georgia hometown to bring her incarcerated niece, Taylor, home to give birth, she expects only to help her through labor. Instead, she is drawn back into a landscape of memory, unfinished mourning, and the women who shaped her understanding of love and survival. As Jewel reconnects with the grandmother who raised her, she uncovers a family legacy of Black midwifery rooted in care, resistance, and the quiet labor of sustaining generations. Through encounters that blur memory, ritual, and waking life, she confronts the grief she has long carried and the inheritance she has spent years trying to escape. When Taylor is finally released, their journey home becomes a space for tenderness, tension, and repair. As labor begins unexpectedly, Jewel must step fully into the lineage she has resisted, discovering that bringing new life into the world may also offer a chance to heal what has been broken.
Ebony Blanding is a writer and director shaped by the South, exploring the complexities and possibilities of Blackness and female relationships through narrative, experimental, and documentary film.
Blanding has helmed branded content for Rolling Stone, directed documentaries for major artists, and created multiple award-winning short films, including Levitate Levitate Levitate, which streamed at Atlanta International Airport.
A co-founder of the art film house House of June, Blanding has shared her work at institutions including Spelman College, Emory University, and Johns Hopkins University. Her films have screened at festivals such as SXSW, Cape Town International Film Festival, and Atlanta Film Society.
Her award-winning debut feature film, A Mess of Memories, a family drama about the weight of things and the memories we carry, was developed during her time as Trilith Institute’s first Emerging Creative in Residence and is the first feature produced with Trilith Institute.
She is an alumna of the 2021 Blackmagic Collective Future Directors of Studio Features Fellowship and the Atlanta Film Society’s 2017–2019 Filmmaker-in-Residence Program. Across mediums, Blanding’s work continues to explore Black womanhood and spirituality through a vibrant, fantastical lens.
