On September 29, Belfast’s Colonial Theatre hosts a screening of Saving Walden’s World, and the partnership behind it says something important about what community actually means.
The Mabel Wadsworth Center was founded in 1984 from conversations around a kitchen table. Five women who believed that healthcare should be built around empowerment, that patients deserve a friend in the process, not just a provider. Today it is the only private, not-for-profit independent feminist health center in Maine, the longest-serving abortion care provider in the state, and one of fewer than twenty such centers in the entire United States.
It is also, right now, providing long-acting contraceptive care to patients while being reimbursed by MaineCare at less than the cost of the devices, after being promised a rate adjustment in February 2025 that still has not arrived. The gap between what the center provides and what the system funds it to provide is not a rounding error. It is the distance between a community that has access to care and one that doesn’t.
That gap is exactly what Saving Walden’s World is about. And on September 29, the film comes to Belfast’s Colonial Theatre as a fundraiser for the center, with every ticket sold moving the needle on the work that Mabel Wadsworth does every day for the people of midcoast and eastern Maine.
When Aspen Ruhlin, Community Engagement Manager at Mabel Wadsworth, was asked how Saving Walden’s World connects to the center’s work, the answer was immediate and precise.
“Climate justice is an essential facet of fighting for reproductive justice,” Ruhlin said. “Clean air, clean water, and livable places are essential for bodily autonomy and for people to parent the children they have in safe and sustainable communities. Just as all oppression is connected, so is all justice.”
The film travels to Kerala, Cuba, and Slovenia, three societies that made deliberate choices about reproductive freedom, healthcare access, and women’s economic participation, and built measurable outcomes from those choices. Kerala’s maternal mortality rate rivals wealthy European nations. Cuba extended reproductive rights in the 1930s, decades before most of the world, and built a healthcare system that has survived six decades of economic blockade. Slovenia’s cooperative institutions give communities structural protection against the economic shocks that push families into crisis.
These are not abstract examples. They are what Mabel Wadsworth is working toward in Bangor, one patient at a time, in a state where the center is the only clinic in Maine to offer the full range of pregnancy care, including both abortion care and prenatal care.
“Every day, we see how access to essential healthcare improves people’s lives and creates healthier communities,” Ruhlin said. “Being the northernmost provider of abortion procedures in the state, we also see firsthand how barriers to care, including transportation and finances create undue stress and burden for people in our community. Reproductive freedom on its own is not enough, people need meaningful access to the full spectrum of sexual and reproductive healthcare without shame.”
The Colonial Theatre has been at the heart of Belfast’s cultural life for over a century. It is, as Program Director Cam Howard describes it, a community gathering space, not just a cinema.
“A film like Saving Walden’s World, that is both made locally and about the environment, which our community is so invested in, represents the synthesis of our values at the theatre,” Howard said. “I hope people leave the screening with some new friends, some new ideas about ways to engage with the world around them, and the inspiration to do so.”
That is a precise description of what the 100 Rooms. 1 Story. campaign is designed to produce. The campaign has now confirmed close to twenty screenings across New England and beyond, from a New Hampshire permaculture gathering to the Cushing Historical Society’s Arts in the Barn, from Laconia to Middlebury, Vermont. Each room is different. Each conversation goes somewhere the previous one didn’t. And each one leaves behind a community that walked out asking different questions than the ones it walked in with.
The Colonial screening on September 29 is the most ambitious event in the campaign so far, a full evening that begins at 6:00 PM with a sustainability social and partner tabling, continues with live music from Maine artist Louisa Stancioff, moves into the film itself, and closes with a live Q&A with director Jim Merkel.
Community support is not a abstraction at Mabel Wadsworth. It is what funds the care packages for abortion patients. It is what allows the center to provide prenatal care for people continuing pregnancies. It is what makes gender-affirming healthcare available to trans people in the community who have nowhere else to go. It is what pays for testimony at the State House and inclusive sex education in schools.
“Community support is what allows us to provide care to and advocate for our community,” Ruhlin said.
The September 29 screening is that support made concrete, an evening where a film about women’s empowerment in Kerala, Cuba, and Slovenia raises money for women’s empowerment in Bangor, Maine. Where a century-old theater opens its doors as a community gathering space. Where a filmmaker who spent years documenting what happens when societies invest in healthcare, education, and reproductive freedom sits down with the audience to talk about what that means for midcoast Maine.
Saving Walden’s World has screened at 23 international film festivals and won 14 awards. It is heading to PBS via NETA later this year. September 29 at the Colonial is one of the last opportunities to see it in a community setting, up close, with the filmmaker present, with the stakes made real by the organization the evening supports.
Event Details:
Tuesday, September 29, 2026
Doors 6:00 PM | Music 6:20 PM | Film 7:00 PM | Q&A 8:00 PM
Colonial Theatre, 163 High St, Belfast, ME
Tickets $15 | colonialtheatre.com
Fundraiser benefiting the Mabel Wadsworth Center
Part of the 100 Rooms. 1 Story. worldwide screening campaign.
