The Musical Innertube - Volume 2, Number 185 - Rebecca Turecky, Ned Phillips and The Last Partera
The Last Partera is a film about a woman who was the last of her kind. We talk with Rebecca Turecky, who continues her work, and Ned Phillips, who helped document her life on film.
For more information on Rebecca's organization, and details on what they're doing to help women in Costa Rica, click here.
In 2023, RISING UP IN THE HEARTLAND (Univision) won 1st place in the Documentary Journalism category at the Picture of the Year International (POYi) contest, a 1st place ONA award for pandemic coverage, and was nominated for a 2023 News & Doc Emmy.
HEROES OF THE PANDEMIC, a Univision/Enlace Latino NC film she co-directed and co-produced, won a 2021 Murrow Award and two 2021 Webby Awards. NIÑAS, a film she co-directed and produced with Agencia Ocote in Guatemala, was part of a comprehensive transmedia project that won the 2022 Premio Gabo.
She was a producer for the PBS docuseries SOMEWHERE SOUTH (2020). Victoria has reported from the US South and rural Midwest, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Greece.
She is an alumna of the New Orleans Film Society Southern Producers Lab, DocShop South, IWMF, and UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Film Fellowship.
Her work has focused on women’s stories, immigration narratives, and religious communities with the aim of using storytelling for social change. She holds a BA from Rutgers University and a Masters in Theological Studies from Duke University Divinity School. Her recent short documentary A HOUSE FOR MY MOTHER won the Best Documentary Short Jury Prize at Oxford Film Festival, 2025.
She co-directed and produced SANTUARIO (2019, PBS/ReelSouth & AlJazeera). SANTUARIO was the winner of the Best Documentary Short Jury Prize at New Orleans Film Festival 2018 as well as the Crested Butte ActNow Award and the IF/Then Shorts American South Pitch.
She is an alumna of the New Orleans Film Society Southern Producers Lab, Indie Grits Real Fiction Lab, and Women in Film/Stella Artois Finishing Fund. She was named a 2021 Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artist by the Durham Arts Council.
Pilar is a 2022 ITVS/NEH Humanities Documentary Development Fellow and a Logan Nonfiction Program Fellow.
Ned Phillips
Ned Phillips is an Emmy-award winning filmmaker based in Durham, North Carolina.
He graduated with honors from Goucher College and went on to earn a certificate in Documentary Arts from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Since then, he has shot and edited multiple films, including work that has screened at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, DOC NYC, and Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival, among others.
He currently works as a producer, cinematographer and editor with PBS North Carolina and Peabody award winning production company Markay Media, which produced the Emmy-award winning PBS documentary series A CHEF’S LIFE, HBO limited series BURDEN OF PROOF and the upcoming AMAZON feature film, The Double.
Ned’s directorial debut, THE MAESTRO (2018), premiered at the RiverRun International Film Festival.
THE LAST PARTERA is his first feature.
Rebecca Turecky
Rebecca Turecky, C.N.M., N.D., is a Costa Rican / U.S. dual citizen.
Rebecca resides in the rural mountain town of Turrialba, Costa Rica and has lovingly assisted more than 1000 natural births, as one of the only independent home birth midwives still practicing in the country.
In the year 2000, she co-founded the Mamasol Association (www.mamasol.com), a non-profit organization which promotes the «Humanization of childbirth» in Costa Rica. This grassroots movement educates and advocates for a more holistic and feminist model of health care and denounces the pervasive obstetric violence against women in the maternity hospitals.
Throughout the decades, Mamasol has organized large public awareness events, collaborated with nursing education at the University of Costa Rica, offered consultation with the C.C.S.S. national maternal health care policy makers, supported legislation for Human Rights in Childbirth (Ley #10081), and trained over 250 doulas in their Escuela de Doulas.
