Here’s one of the shorts in the Futurestates short series. This one’s called Silver Sling directed by Tze Chun (Children of Invention and Windowbreaker). It deals with the contemporary issues of immigration, surrogacy, and motherhood but within the framework of a speculative future. Take a look a the Silver Sling synopsis:

In the polarized economy of the near future, corporations offer financial incentives to their high-ranking female employees to pay for chemically accelerated surrogate births. The surrogates, for the most part, are people on the lower end of the economic spectrum — often immigrants or people looking to make their rent. Though the windfall to a woman who agrees to be an accelerated-birth surrogate is substantial, there are side effects. One can only undergo three surrogate births before becoming sterile.

Silver Sling follows Lydia, a Russian immigrant in her late 20s, as she tries to decide whether or not to agree to her third surrogate pregnancy. If she does, she will be able to bring her little brother over from Russia to care for him, which she had promised her dying mother she would do. But making good on that promise will end her own dreams to have a child with her devoted boyfriend, Stephan. Lydia, motivated by her familial responsibilities, chooses to undergo a third accelerated pregnancy.

As she begins the process to be accepted as a potential surrogate, Lydia meets Ana, a nurse on her first day at the Silver Sling clinic. While Lydia is gruff, hardened by her time in the U.S., Ana is kind and unassuming. But beyond their visible differences, Ana and Lydia have something in common that Lydia would never have imagined — a secret that will unite them.

You can watch this Tze Chun short along with some behind the scenes footage. His film Children of Invention is also in theaters now.

Silver Sling by Tze Chun

Silver Sling (Behind the scenes)