Access to safe and legal abortion has never come with the relative security of other kinds of reproductive healthcare services. Whereas banning the procedure hasn’t proven successful, lawmakers have found loopholes to create other barriers. TRAP laws that nitpick about the width of hallways or distance from one medical facility to another have come to pass in states like Texas and Oklahoma. When the proverbial hands of abortion providers can’t be tied any tighter, these same lawmakers target the patients in need of abortion services. Mandatory ultrasounds and 24-hour waiting periods suggest that patients seeking abortion aren’t clear about the weight of their decision and need state intervention to handle it responsibly. Shatterbox film director Anu Valia recognizes these undue burdens for exactly what they are. In her new short film Lucia, Before and After, Valia documents the brief (but still unnecessarily long) process of one woman, Lucia, as she waits the mandatory 24 hours before she can receive her abortion in Texas. By focusing on that relatively tiny span of time, abortion is framed as just one of the many decisions and circumstances someone might have to navigate in the grand scheme of their daily lives. The film infuses the “abortion narrative” with the humanity that it deserves. Lucia, Before and After will be premiering at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. I was lucky enough to chat with Valia about why this film was so important to her."Thank you! Lots of mood boards. Whenever I make movies lots of thought goes into it — and not just on my end. On the art director's end, on the costume designer's end, and the cinematographer's end — color palettes and creating this world that is visually consistent. We start talking sometimes months before about what colors are appropriate for which scenes, what lighting is appropriate for which scene. When it’s only daytime outside, it needs to be these colors. When it’s daytime inside, it can only be these colors. We just set a lot of really strict rules. We talk about these rules for literally months. Everyone shares images. We make sure that there’s no red in the frame. That was actually one of our rules [for this film]. That there was no red in any shot. We set these things out because making a movie is very hard, so if everyone is on the same page from the beginning you can make changes on the fly. It’s not so strict every second on set because it’s too hard to do that. But we can make these choices early and hopefully stick to these rules throughout the film."