‘The resource that I wish I had’
Local filmmaker debuts animated short on reproductive health
When Chari Pere of Teaneck lost a pregnancy in 2014, she searched for resources online but did not find the support she was looking for. It seemed like “no one was sharing their stories,” she said.
“I didn’t realize how common it was. Nobody talked about it. After I started telling people, I found out that my own mother and grandmother had miscarriages. I didn’t know that.
“I said from that moment, when I’m in a better headspace, I have to tell this story.”
Ms. Pere is a cartoonist. Her “focus and passion” is humor, she said. “I interned at Mad magazine in college. A lot of my work is trying to make people laugh and smile.”
But she has also done more serious work. One of her first projects, while she was still in college, at New York’s School of Visual Arts, was a coloring book for children with diabetes. “And I kind of got the bug to use my skills to make a difference,” she said.
A few years later, she collaborated with Gretchen Rubin, author of the bestselling children’s book “The Happiness Project,” on an online comic companion to the book. In that work, “I used my art to help people try to figure out what their passions are through the lens of Gretchen Rubin.” Ms. Pere has also created a comic that focuses on bullying prevention. Another project was a short comic about one woman’s journey to get out of her abusive marriage and to obtain her Jewish divorce document, her get. “That really shaped a lot of my career going forward,” she said. “Seeing how releasing a comic online, how it could go viral and impact people was really something that always stuck with me.”
In 2017, Ms. Pere put her story into a comic, “Miscarried: Everything I Didn’t Want to Know about Miscarriages (But Experienced First Hand).” It’s about “my personal experience of having a miscarriage at 10 weeks, five days,” she said. The pregnancy Ms. Pere lost was her second. She was able to have a baby not long afterwards and now has three children — ages 13, 10, and 6.
Three years after her miscarriage, “almost to the day,” Ms. Pere posted “Miscarried” online, “and it kind of started to take on a life of its own,” she said.
Actor Mayim Bialik helped publicize the comic, “and it went viral, and I was receiving messages from people all over the world.”
Then it dawned on her that “as little as women discuss miscarriage, men don’t talk about it at all.” That thought was confirmed by an email from a woman who had seen the “Miscarried” strip. The reader suggested that Ms. Pere consider creating a comic about a husband’s perspective because the letter writer’s own husband had wished he had had an outlet for his grief. In 2018, in time for Father’s Day, “Michael’s Miscarriage” became the second true story in Ms. Pere’s “Unspoken Cartoons” series.
The following year, she released “The Diagnosis,” which tells the story of a friend’s experience with a prenatal Down syndrome diagnosis. That strip came out before World Down Syndrome Day in March. The most recent comic in the series, “Determination,” tells the story of local photographer Abbie Sophia’s difficult decision to abort one of her twin fetuses after it was diagnosed with a severe defect that put her and the other fetus in danger. Ms. Pere released “Determination” online in October 2024, before National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day.
Last year, Ms. Pere started adapting those comics into animated short films. She refers to them as “cartoonmentaries.” She coined the term to refer to the animated shorts she created to tell people’s stories. “Miscarried” and “Michael’s Miscarriage” were launched in 2024 and received a host of awards.
“Determined,” the third film in the series, premiered last month at the SoHo International Film Festival. It will premiere online on Monday, November 3, at 8:30 p.m. (See box).
Ms. Pere initially met Abbie Sophia at a photo shoot. Her extended family was spending time together and hired a photographer for the occasion. The two connected on Facebook. “Then when I was pregnant with my third child, Abbie was going through a difficult pregnancy. I was at the same exact stage as her — our babies were basically born three days apart — so I followed her. Abbie had always hoped to have twin girls because she has a twin sister.” After struggling with infertility and undergoing a number of IVF cycles, “Abbie found out she was pregnant with twin girls. Then something went horribly wrong with one of the fetuses, and she had to make a terrible decision about whether to reduce the pregnancy to save herself and the other fetus.
“I was very interested in her story because I was relating to it. And I couldn’t believe how open she was. So I reached out and I said, ‘I’m looking for more stories to tell in comics.’
“It’s one thing for people to tell their stories; it’s another thing to have an iconic image of a cartoon character,” Ms. Pere continued. “It’s not the same as an actor playing a role because you can get lost in thinking that the actor is that character. But when you have a cartoon, I try to create it in a way that people can relate to the character and feel like they’re in the heels of that character. Because it’s not real, it’s a cartoon character, and it’s very simply drawn in a way that I hope is universally pleasing.”
Ms. Pere feels that an animated film is another powerful vehicle. “If you watch a documentary, that’s that person’s story,” she said. “That’s that person’s experience.” In art school, there was a lot of emphasis on “iconography and how comics and illustrations and animations really put you in the position to be that character and experience it in ways that you wouldn’t realize. It really puts you in the driver’s seat front and center to go through this.” A cartoon or animation format is also a way to make this type of heavy material more digestible and easier to engage with, she added.
She sees both formats as a good way to disseminate information and at the same time help people who have gone through something similar to feel less alone. They can also be a good tool for people who are trying to understand how others might feel when they go through something similar, Ms. Pere added. “It’s a way to really put themselves in that position and understand what their friends and family are going through.
“This is the resource that I wish that I had. You can’t change what happened, but the mental load could have been a lot easier if I had just known that one in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage, that most people bounce back and are able to have kids afterwards. To know that there’s a journey that other people are on would have been really helpful. My goal is to create the resources that I wish were available when I had my situation 11 years ago.”
Ms. Pere is now working on the fourth short film in the “Unspoken” series, “The Diagnosis.”
Looking forward, she hopes to tell more stories. “There’s a lot in the reproductive health field — infertility, secondary infertility, stillbirth, postpartum depression. There are a lot of topics to cover. And I would also love to expand to tackle mental health issues, cancer, and loss of a loved one.
“I think it’s just important for people to try to use the skills and the strengths that they have to put some good into the world,” Ms. Pere concluded. “There’s a lot of heaviness. So it’s very rewarding for me that I can use my talents to help in some way. I hope that my material is there when people need it. I hope that my work makes a bit of a difference in someone’s world.”
What: The online premiere of “Determined,” a short animated film by Chari Pere.
When: Monday, November 3, at 8:30 p.m.
Where: On Zoom
To get on the Zoom call: Go to Ms. Pere’s website, www.charipere.com, and follow the links
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