The picture is set around 2006 in San Fransisco's Bay Area, where the very pregnant Gia (Nomore) works a dead-end job at a portrait studio, hoping to get her two children out of foster care.

This is Melinda Olson; she's the original Earth Mama. A nurse, mother, and grandmother, Melinda is also a plant lady/gardener and avid herbalist.

Earth Mama was filmed with an ARRI 416 camera and processed at Kodak Atlanta. The grade was performed by Sam Daley at Light Iron, for a 4K 1.66:1 deliverable.

The movie includes a quasi-documentary essence in its analytical view of the system that Gia and other mothers in hard circumstances confront—a system that takes their children and takes over the women's lives, under ostensibly benevolent state regulations, in exchange for a modicum of contact with their kids.