She turned to film after an injury and has now made her heartbreaking debut – about a woman fighting to get her kids out of foster care and keep her unborn child. So what is the young powerhouse going to conquer next?
There is impressive, there is spectacular and there is Savanah Leaf – not yet 30 and already accumulating giddying lifetime achievements. At the age of 18, she played volleyball for Team GB at the 2012 Olympics. Then came a psychology degree. After that she returned to volleyball, turning pro and touring Turkey and Puerto Rico. Then, in 2015, an injury put her out of action for 18 months. “My whole world shifted,” she said. “I had to figure out what I was going to do next.”
Leaf signed up to a course in music video production and by 2020 had been Grammy-nominated, for a promo she directed for blues guitarist Gary Clark Jr. Now she has made her feature film debut with Earth Mama, a heartbreaking drama about Gia, a young, pregnant black woman in San Francisco fighting to get her two children out of foster care and agonising over whether to put her unborn baby up for adoption.
