womenandhollywood-google-maps

Jennifer Fox's epic documentary explorations on women's roles is available for purchase today. The series focuses on Jennifer Fox's questions about gender issues, motherhood, marriage and in the parts airing tonight she asks these questions of women activists working on issues in countries around the world. Check out my recent interview with Jennifer: Interview with Jennifer Fox

Purchase the DVD here ($3 from each DVD sale goes to Our Bodies Ourselves): Buy Flying

Parts 3 and 4 of the six part series Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman airs tonight (Monday) on the Sundance channel. The series focuses on Jennifer Fox's questions about gender issues, motherhood, marriage and in the parts airing tonight she asks these questions of women activists working on issues in countries around the world.

Women & Hollywood was able to ask Jennifer Fox about making the film and how it has changed her.

Women & Hollywood: Each episode starts off with the following resonant statement: "I never wanted to be a girl in the way a girl was supposed to be. I wanted to be a boy. They could do anything they wanted to do." Why was it important to begin each episode that way?

Jennifer Fox: I think it really sums up the dilemma of our lives -- boys can do everything and girls can do very little. Remember, I grew up in the late 50s but I have a feeling that girls grow up not so different today…the gender lines have not been broken. And on this iconographic issue of raising children in some ways its like we are back in the 50s.

W&H: In the beginning episodes you are focused on having a child after many years of ambivalence. You question whether you are real woman in our culture without having a child.

JF: We define women as being married mothers actually. It's marriage plus children.

W&H: Do you feel you are in a different place from where you started the film?

JF: You are looking at a woman who has run away screaming from a female identity, saying I will not be controlled by the rules, I will live as men live. At the beginning of the film I am a long way from being a feminist because I completely sided with my father. I arrive at the end of the film siding with my mother and realizing that I am a part of a fabric that I didn't know I was part of before. At the end of the film [which was two years ago] I was still much more focused on having a child than I am now. I certainly feel that you can be woman and not have children, but I don't think society feels that.

W&H: Do you think that if you would have had more of a feminist identity you have come to the film from a different place?

JF: Oh yeah, but I think the film would not have been as good. I think that if I would have talked as politically as I do now it wouldn't have made for a good film. What's good about the film is that I was in a crisis of identity; I couldn't speak the language because I couldn't identify. What you see is someone searching for who they are. That was real. The good news about the film is that you follow my journey and that made a better film and one that younger women highly identify with.

W&H: Because you are not self-identified as a feminist?

JF: Right, and just like when I was a kid a lot of people still see feminist as a bad word.

W&H: Your film is heterosexually focused. Did you think about having lesbian stories as part of the film?

JF: I did really want to have a lesbian story but all of my attempts failed. I always thought that at the end of the film I would break up with these 2 guys and go out with a woman as a way to investigate my bisexuality. It didn't happen. I think the problem is because there are so few films like this that we want it to cover everything. It's actually quite a narrow. It's about sexual freedom and control internationally. The main thing was that the film had to go around the world, not that it had to cover all female identities.

W&H: What was so interesting was that you are taking people on a journey and exposing them to the international women's movement that many people here in the US are so unfamiliar with.

JF: I think what's really important about Flying is issues of representation. We are used to looking at the third world in a kind of object-oriented way when the camera points at them and hides the filmmaker. What I was trying to do was to say that we (US) who think we are so different from them are actually in the same frame. That's why it was so important for me to put a white affluent, western woman in the same frame as a woman from Pakistan or Cambodia or India to visually shift the representation. I wanted to say these women are like us. That's why the issues of my sexual abuse and sexuality were so important to unravel in the film because they are so common and that totally breaks down the wall between us.

W&H: Your film was financed internationally? How did you make that happen?

JF: I have quite an international reputation in the documentary film scene. The reason why this was a Danish co-production is because the film making strategies -- the one person one camera -- and the intimacy is something they've done very successfully in Denmark. A producer approached me and we decided to partner. Doing a co-production is always quite hard. I lived in Denmark for a year and a half and my Danish editor was here and its hard and always more expensive. In our case it was successful because there was a creative reason to work together.

W&H: Why do you think that women are drawn to documentaries?

JF: They are just so much fun to make and they are hands on. Of course politically, [docs are more welcoming to women because of the smaller crews, smaller budgets, and less power] but at the same time it's also about having direct contact with a subject and people and I think women thrive on that. We are relationship beings.

There are very few women making series and when I made American Love Story I was the only woman I knew in PBS land who made a series. I'm probably still the only woman to have directed and produced a ten-hour series for public TV. One of the issues I had to deal with [at the time] was how a thirty something woman could be trusted with the scope and the money this would take. Those issues of money, power and responsibility are always the same for women.

W&H: Why do you think your film is resonating with people?

JF: I see this film is resonating so differently and it generates profound dialogue. Women and men say to me: "this is my life and nobody has put it on screen before and it's such a relief." I don't think that I've made a film that speaks so universally and directly before. My films have been successful but this is something different. Screening after screening I see this other reaction. I see it as a movement. You have to let people talk.

W&H: Do you embrace feminism now?

JF: I do. A lot of the effort is to get people to talk about gender in a new way and to see that sexism and gender issues are so ingrained in us and you have to do the daily work. It means don't capitulate to the idea of giving up your job because you have kids. There is a point where we have to demand gender equality and you have to start with yourself.

More info: Flying
Order the DVD

Pray the Devil Back to Hell, is a powerful documentary about the courageous women of Liberia who stood up and said no more to war and through their sheer determination and grit were able to transform a country. The film premiered this week at the Tribeca Film Festival where it was just awarded the prize for best documentary feature. In awarding the prize the jurors said: “In a relentless pursuit of peace, the women of Liberia show us how community, motherly love and perseverance can change the fate of a society. Pray the Devil Back to Hell is a reminder that we have the power to say “Enough!” to the atrocities of our world."

The film is produced by Abigail E. Disney and directed by Gini Reticker. Both Abby and Gini were able to answer some questions about the film and their extraordinary collaboration.

Women & Hollywood: You and Gini seem to have a real collaborative relationship beyond the typical producer/ director.

Abby Disney: Gini trusts me a lot and vice versa. We decided we didn't want to work that way.

Gini Reticker: We hadn't seen each other for years and we ran into each just after Abby had been to Liberia. We were totally on the same page about what was important in the story. It was wonderful to have her and she was also respectful of me in the edit room. She would make suggestions that respected my experience. It's been an incredibily dynamic relationship.

W&H: Talk about where you got the title from.

GR: One of the main character in the film Leymah Gbowee says that Charles Taylor could pray the devil out of hell and it was such a great expression. What the women did by banding together is that they prayed the devil back to hell. I don't think that it was only Charles Taylor as the man, but it was the evil force they saw. The country had lost its moral compass and the women came forward and said hey, let's get this under control.

W&H: Abby, you financed the film yourself?

AD: Yes, it seemed easier rather than having to go to people to ask for money. It gave me nimbleness and an ability to react more quickly and to think independently without having to answer to anybody.

W&H: What was the budget?

AD: We spent around $800,000. It was not an easy shoot. There is no power in Liberia so you need generators. We had to build our own sets and I was not about to go without insurance. As the producer I felt very responsible for everyone and their safety. And Gini is well respected as is Kirsten Johnson, the Director of Photography, and these are people who should be paid appropriately.

W&H: Talk a bit about what you've learned from your first foray into the movie business.

AD: I didn't have a lot of the problems women have because I didn't need to go and ask for money. I didn't have to talk anyone in charge of the purse strings and convince them as to why this was important because I knew this was a tough sell. Even if there are women in charge they are still accountable to men. So they are very averse to taking risks especially if its seen as a "women's thing." It's difficult to get anybody in the mainstream media to understand this. That's why I felt I was uniquely positioned to get this done.

W&H: Can you talk about working as a woman director and any difficulties you have faced.

GR: For me working in documentaries has really been easy and its been manageable with having a family which has been really nice because I had some control over my career. I've always been drawn to women's issues. Before I made documentaries I worked in women's health care and that is what drew me to working on my first film. I think that working in documentaries has been the ideal profession for me.

W&H: You've been involved in women's issues for a long time but never felt compelled to tell a story before.

AD: I've felt compelled to tell a story before just not compelled enough to do it.

W&H: Why was this different?

AD: Everything lined up on this one. Part of it is how old my kids are and how much time I had. This really was a story that was going to be erased from the historical records that was really worth holding onto.

W&H: Talk more about how women's accomplishments get erased from history.

AD: Yesterday I was talking to a high school class after a screening and asked them if they heard of Sacagawea and of course they had. They had, because there were women who worked and resurfaced the memory of her. She was not in the historical records as I was taught it when I was in high school. This is the persistent manner of how we have defined authority as not to include women. If they don't look authoritative they don't get captured in the media which then gets converted into the historical record. We clearly knew what was going on in Liberia. The news media didn't look at what the women were doing here as authoritative, and they simply did not point their cameras in that direction. We had no problems finding the footage of the killings, the shootings and the maimings, but when the women were working for peace the cameras were not pointed in that direction. That tells us a great deal about what the news media thinks is worth telling and how much of what genuinely happens we don't hear.

W&H: You mentioned before that we tend to see women in Africa as victims not through their accomplishments and that it was important for you to tell this positive story.

GR: Most of the media you see on Africa portrays Africa and Africans as victims and not agents of their own lives. I feel that the people that I met there are just like you and me. As a documentary filmmaker I am always drawn to what I have in common with someone rather than that which makes us different. I feel the common bond of humanity is fascinating and so I was hell bent on making sure the women were able to tell their own story and they were portrayed in the way I saw them. I also felt that by doing that it is much easier to be inspired by them.

W&H: Our country is not aware of the global women's movement and you have an opportunity to bring some international feminism tothis country.

AD: I don't think it will be hard. When I tell people about the 12 countries that the film has shown in about how the women in Kurdistan and Georgia wept and then wrote a peace agenda. I think this will be very appealing to women if we get it to them through the right medium, through the right messenger and in the right form.

W&H: Media, messenger, form? Explain.

AD: Well, obviously, all of those things come together in Oprah Winfrey. We are going to work on finding the right messengers on TV, radio and the internet to bring this message to women.

W&H: How are you going to get the film out there? Do you have a distributor?

AD: I'm not going to a distributor with my hat in my hand begging them to distribute the film. If we don't get a good deal we will distribute it ourselves.

W&H: Hollywood doesn't seem to be interested in women's stories. What are your feelings about that?

GR: The thing about Hollywood not liking women's stories, I think it's a case of blindness to a real market, to a real hunger. That's the response we are getting from this film. There is a hunger for stories that are more hopeful that show a different side of things. The distribution of this film will be fascinating. We will try to have a theatrical release but we are getting requests from people who want to fill movie theaters around the country. We're getting more requests to show the film than we can deal with at this time. We are trying to harness all that and also look at alternative distribution models but I think we will probably do a hybrid and do everything. I would have to say hats off to Abby because she has enormous aspirations and energy and she is really committed to this film and to the ideas behind it.

W&H: And you will create a curriculum and other educational devices?

AD: the opportunities through educational institutions, religious institutions, through girls clubs, youth organizations, women's organizations are vast and there is a curriculum for each one of these groups.

W&H: A lot of times people say movies are just movies that they don't have the power to make change and to effect people.

AD: Movies are just movies if that's how you go about making them. of all the media we have this is the closest in tone and feel to the dream which comes from the deepest part of ourselves. we do such a disservice to ourselves to not use this medium with the respect it deserves because it has innately such enormous power to address our deepest needs and our deepest values and deepest longings. That's why my uncle (Walt) was very good at what he did. He understood that it had enormous power to go right into the center of who a person was and that's why i wanted to make this film. I couldn't write this as a book, I couldn't go around the world and tell people the story, you needed to have everything come together in music and visuals and sound in the way it does in this film and I think Gini has done an effective job in making sure that whole thing coheres.

W&H: What would you uncle say about this film?

AD: I'm not sure. I know he was a man of his time in many ways, politically he was very conservative and he was afraid of communists but I also know he had a good center, a good heart and I don't think this film is a politics film it has a real appeal to people without politics. sometimes you need to strip away politics and restore a dialogue without politics. and in that way, I think he'd love it.

W&H: What do you want people who see this film to get out of it?

GR: The response to far has been tremendous that whatever I thought that i wanted people to get out of it, they're getting much more out of it. I feel that people are being inspired in all sorts of different ways that I could never have imagined. There are people who see this as instrumental to doing peace work. I woke up yesterday morning to an email from women in Tiblsi, Georgia saying that they had seen the film and shown it to other women, their region is having heightened militarism with ethnic overtones and they decided to take up the mantle of the women of Liberia and are starting their own peace movement. What could be better than that. Women in Sudan say its going to change their lives. On that level its beyond my wildest hopes.

W&H: What are you doing next?

GR: Abby and I are continuing to work together and are co-producing a 4 hour series on women in conflict for Wide Angle on PBS.

Check out the Pray the Devil Back to Hell Trailer

Getting back up to speed after a week away and wanted to remind folks that tomorrow night at 10pm on HBO is the premiere of Lisa Jackson excellent documentary The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo.

Here is a rerun of an interview I did with Lisa when the film premiered at Sundance earlier this year.

Women & Hollywood: Why did you want to make this movie?

Lisa Jackson: It's an invisible story as a lot of women's stories are, the horrific tale of the systematic rape and mutilation of hundred and thousands of women. It's just stunning to me that nobody was reporting it. The NY Times did one story on this angle of the war. But what they are doing to women…not only the militias from the neighboring countries but the Congolese army itself. I interviewed soldiers who were raping the very women they were supposed to be protecting.

W&H: It was amazing that when you were talking to the rapists how they had a complete and total disconnect from the harm they were actually causing.

LJ: They [the Congolese army] see themselves as just "raping" whereas the militias are the one who mutilate the women and fire guns into their vaginas. But the end result is exactly the same. The women are shunned, turned out from their villages and abandoned. So the end result is exactly the same and that they parse the difference is just ridiculous, the disconnect is pretty profound.

W&H: You made yourself a character in the film. Why did you do that?

LJ: It wasn't something I was initially going to do but people who saw rough cuts said that I absolutely had to because it was through telling them my story [of being raped] that the barriers between us came down.

W&H: What compelled you to go to the Congo?

LJ: Here was this story, the stories of these women and no one was telling it. It seemed important to me not to have some hand wringing piece but to actually listen to the women's stories. These are women who are silent and to be able to share their story with someone who was not judging them was an experience none of them ever had.

I went to Kinshasa on frequent flyer miles and with documentaries you never know what you are getting into. I don’t have much experience shooting in conflict zones but a friend working with the UN Peacekeepers was able to get me a UN credential. I then made my way east to where the real nightmare was unfolding.

My radar is particularly attuned to those voices, which are the other side of war. I thought for years of doing a survey film on the fate of women and girls in conflict zones because of the ongoing devastating effects of war. So I went to the worst place first to shoot.

I am continuing the theme and have been to Colombia twice in the last three months doing a film on displaced women. It is said that 60% of the women in Colombia have suffered either physical or sexual violence. This is another one of those invisible stories, and it is a requirement of a documentary to find stories that otherwise you would never hear about.

W&H: How did it feel being a first world white woman going into a third world country?

LJ: I thought that through before I went. I was a white woman in the bush with a camera. I might as well have been dumped from a spaceship. I thought that as much as I could it was important to let them know I was one of them so I brought photographs to demystify where I was coming from and I shared my story of rape. They kept asking me about the war [thinking that rape only occurs in timer of war]. They asked lots of questions including, did you family know you were raped? How was it is you got married? They were fascinated that I had a boyfriend, and they were stunned to hear that I chose not to have children.

Their questions pointed to how different we really were. I feel an intense responsibility to them. It was the rare woman who would tell me her story without pleading for help for her and her sisters.

W&H: Why do you think that women directors are so well represented in documentaries versus features?

LJ: I've only made documentaries for 35 years, but the thing about docs especially now, is that you have the option of doing it on your own. On this film I shot it, did the sound, directed, and edited it -- I was a one-person band. I tried for almost a year to get funding. I have never done a doc this way but you really do have that option especially working on a small scale. You have a lot more control. This is also a film that nobody would have funded because it's such a bummer subject, but once people see it they are shocked that nobody has done it before. I knew that once I got over there are started filming that I would get support because people would see from the women's faces hear their stories and realize what a compelling subject it was.

W&H: What can people do to help?

LJ: We are putting together an outreach strategy around the culture of impunity to hopefully pressure the Congo government to prosecute rapists. We will provide resources where people can donate money. But also it's important for the first world to look at its role. This is an economic war. The blood of Congolese women are on our cell phones. It's important to understand that it's not just a bunch of crazy Africans killing each other. There is an economic imperative behind the pillaging, killing and rape.

To strike at the women is to strike at the heart of the culture. If you destroy women the civilization collapses.

For more information and to see the trailer: http://www.thegreatestsilence.org/

I loved everything about Girls Rock! I loved that the movie told the story of girls who come together to embrace (or discover) their musical and creative sides. I loved that these girls found a place where they could truly be themselves with no consequences. I loved that women rockers who had been through what these girls are experiencing -- feeling like a freak and unsure of yourself and your place in the world -- were able to show them the light at the end of the tunnel. And, I especially liked that this was a film about something important and it was still fabulously fun and entertaining.

I remember how much it sucks being a girl who is not exactly made from the cookie cutter mold, and watching these girls struggle with identity made me so glad to be done with that. While many things have changed for the better since I was a girl (like the very fact that there is a rock and roll camp for girls) some things have gotten a lot worse namely the pressure to be thin and to conform. Rock camp is a space for girls to be themselves, to embrace their voices and to roar. (They actually make them yell as loud as they can.) It also helps them to develop communication and team type skills as their bands work together to write music and lyrics for the concert that happens at the end of the week. The camp also teaches self-defense and gives girls other tools to survive the boxes that girls get put in by our culture.

The statistics strewn the film just make you want to cry including the fact that women are only 22% of musical performers in music videos (but are a majority of the scantily dressed fans); and that teen girls spend $43 billion on fashion and beauty products.

Directors Shane King and Arne Johnson are incredibly respectful about their portraits of the four girls highlighted in the film. It's not often that I say this, but these guys really get it, and people who work with girls can take some important lessons from this film on how men and women can work together to help improve the lives of girls.

Here's what the directors had to say:

The persistence of the questions [about why men would be interested in making a movie about girls] has brought another issue to mind, and that is the embarrassment we have had to confront about the idea that a man would care about women's issues. It's perfectly acceptable for a straight white man to publicly protest the mistreatment of homeless people or a racist miscarriage of justice. But if a man speaks passionately about the mistreatment of half of the world's population- their lovers, daughters, nieces, mother, grandmothers, aunts, sisters- there seems to be some kind of shame attached. Like you're somehow "going to the other side" or being a weak man.

We care what happens to women...we want them to be full participants in our culture, not just because of fairness and equality, but also because life is richer when their voices are heard.

And so we embrace these questions about being men making this movie, because it gives us an excuse to talk in ways that men don't usually.

AMEN- Go see this film!

Film opens today in NY, LA, Seattle, Portland, SF and Chicago and will roll out in other cities this spring. For info on the film and where it is showing: Girls Rock!

The Business of Being Born, the new documentary produced by Ricki Lake and directed by Abby Epstein has been playing in limited release in several cities across the country. For information on where the film is playing: The Business of Being Born

Here is my review: Review of The Business of Being Born

Women & Hollywood: How did you become involved with this film?

Abby Epstein: Ricki Lake and I became friendly when I directed her in "The Vagina Monologues" Off-Broadway. We stayed in touch and I knew that she was planning a homebirth for her second child, although at the time I thought she was completely nuts! A few years later, Ricki had finished her talk show and relocated to LA so I stopped by to see her new house and have a visit. I had just completed my first doc "Until the Violence Stops" about the worldwide V-Day movement and Ricki was looking to start a "dream" project about midwives and birthing. I was completely ignorant on the topic but intrigued by Ricki's passion, so I asked her for some reading material and she gave me a book called "Spiritual Midwifery" by Ina May Gaskin. Then Ricki showed me the home video footage of her homebirth (which we use in the film) and I was completely blown away. We began from there.

W&H: How did your involvement with the film effect your own birth experience?

AE: On the one hand, I was very fortunate having spent 2 years researching birthing options in NYC before I became pregnant. I was not only a highly informed customer, but I had attended several births and did not have any more fear about the birth process. So, I felt like I had all these amazing people to choose from when it came time to selecting a provider (of course not all of them took my HMO, so that limited me a bit) But on the other hand, I was put in a position where there became pressure to include my birth in the film - which I resisted. I had no interest in turning the cameras on myself and was unsure whether we were in fact going to document my birth until the very last moment.

W&H: Explain why you chose the title The Business of Being Born.

AE: Truthfully, we couldn't think of anything short and catchy. None of us really loved the title but it seemed to encompass the broad range of aspects we were looking at in the birthing "business."

W&H: It seems that you and Ricki are both on a type of crusade here - using the film to help educate and organize women to take back their own bodies and their births. Did you ever expect the film would morph into this type of movement?

AE: We never expected that the film would have such an impact on mainstream birth culture. I think we suspected that it would hit a nerve, but we honestly just wanted to put the information out there in a bold way - not watered down. It all stemmed from Ricki's personal experience and grew organically from there. But we have definitely started a movement along with other writers and activists - Jennifer Block's book PUSHED was published at the same time we premiered, which was amazing. I think we are on a crusade to inform, but not to convince women to have natural births or homebirths. The modern woman wants information and options - but no one should feel pressured or regretful about their choices.

W&H: There seems to be a lot of women directing documentaries these days. Why do you think that is?

AE: I think that documentaries often have more substance than features and women are attracted to material that is potent and meaningful rather than commercially viable. Of course, there is also the fact that docs are low-budget and don't pay well (if at all!) so there is less competition.

But mostly I think that docs are usually self-generated passion projects where a director can have total control and women are organized, not afraid of hard work and always like a bit of control!

W&H: What's next for you?

AE: We are still opening the film in major cities (Chicago, Seattle, Boston, DC) so I am busy with that until April. Then, I am planning some vacation time with my family! Ricki and I are in the midst of writing a book based on the movie which will come out in April 2009 and a follow-up DVD that will accompany the book. We are also hard at work on our website - turning it into a resource for birth information and options. So, I will still be busy with all things BOBB for a while and then I plan to direct an independent feature film. I'd like to get back to working with actors and writers, which is truly what I love.

Film is available on netflix now