Christy Turlington Burns was in Toronto Friday for the Canadian screening of her directorial debut of “No Woman, No Cry”.

The documentary film begins with Turlington Burns delivering her first child, a baby girl, with a midwife. But an hour after baby Grace’s birth in 2003, the placenta had not yet emerged which put her in serious danger.

The midwife and an obstetrician had to remove it from the wall of her uterus began to hemorrhage.  Luckily, Burns survived the ordeal.

“I was fortunate to have survived the complication…but not everyone is.”

When Christy visited a village in El Salvador, where few women received adequate postpartum care, she realized she’d likely have died if she had given birth there.

“That was when I had my ‘aha’ moment, when I realized that this was going to be my cause,” said the former supermodel and mom.

No Woman No Cry brings light to the staggering statistics:  a woman dies every 90 seconds from complications of pregnancy. More than 500,000 women die each year during childbirth. Ninety percent of these deaths are preventable.

Turlington Burns does a wonderful job in showing the viewer the gripping personal stories of various women around the world who have dealt with maternal health issues.

As Turlington Burns narrates, the documentary film begins with footage of her own birth experience, filmed by her husband director Ed Burns.  She takes us across the globe to Tanzania where we meet a woman who is overdue in her pregnancy and must walk eight kilometres to a health clinic while she’s in labour.  She hasn’t eaten and can’t afford transportation to the nearest hospital.

The film moves to Bangladesh, where a health worker tries to encourage a young mother to give birth in hospital rather than at home, which is the norm in the country.  Turlington Burns also covers the surprising statistics back in the United States, where one in five women of reproductive age who don’t have health insurance.

A U.S. father shares his painful story about losing his wife who bled to death from an amniotic fluid embolism.  We visit a post-abortion care ward in Guatemala, where a doctor talks about her frustration in her country’s cultural beliefs that don’t allow women to practice birth control.

Dr. Peter Singer, chief executive officer of Grand Challenges Canada, invited Turlington Burns to showcase her film in Toronto.  Grand Challenges Canada is a bold new approach to foreign aid that strives to transform global health through Integrated Innovation, and is hosted by the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health.

“All moms want the same thing in life – to educate your kids and feed your kids.  If you can’t do that, you feel like a failure as a mom,” Turlington Burns said in a panel discussion after the film screening at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto.

Also on the panel were Mary Tidlund, The Mary A. Tidlund Charitable Foundation and Karlee Silver and McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health and Grand Challenges Canada.