Director: Elizabeth Sankey
Long before postpartum depression had a clinical name, cinema already had an image for it: the witch, hunched over a cauldron, cast out by her own village, and Witches traces that unlikely thread all the way to the present day.
What is Witches about?
Director Elizabeth Sankey builds the documentary around her own experience of a postpartum breakdown, weaving clips from decades of witch films — fairy tales, horror classics, arthouse features — alongside candid testimony from mothers who lived through similar crises. Rather than treating the two subjects as separate essays stitched together, the film argues that the folklore around witches was always coded language for the fear, isolation, and perceived madness placed onto new mothers, and that cinema kept recycling the same imagery without naming what it was really depicting. The result moves between film history and memoir, letting archival footage comment on lived experience and vice versa.
Cast & crew
Sankey appears on screen herself as both director and subject, joined by Sophia Di Martino, Catherine Cho, and Shema Tariq, whose interviews supply the personal accounts that anchor the film's argument. David Emson, Milli Richards, Lucy Warwick-Guasp, and Krystal Wilkinson round out the voices contributing to the documentary's mix of memoir and cultural history.
Context & significance
Witches premiered in 2024 as a British documentary released in the wake of growing public conversation around maternal mental health, and it draws on a long line of feminist film criticism that reads horror archetypes as displaced social anxieties. The film earned a strong 7.4 rating on IMDb, reflecting an enthusiastic response from critics who praised its unusual structure and its willingness to sit with genuinely difficult material rather than resolve it neatly.
Where & how to watch
Witches is available on K-Time with Persian subtitles, letting Farsi-speaking viewers follow both the historical footage and the interviews with full context. The page itself is free to browse without an account, and streaming the documentary only requires logging into K-Time — a straightforward, Farsi-first experience built for the Iranian diaspora.