Grrls make movies: the emergence of women-led filmmaking initiatives for teenage girls

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2005 by Kathleen Sweeney

According to Associate Director of Outreach Deborah Aubert, the objective of the program was to create "a curriculum that would be primarily facilitated by non-filmmaker and non-artist youth development staff" through the twelve-session production of thirty-second PSAs. The goal of the Girls Inc. initiative was a more "process as opposed to product" program. Says Aubert, "It tends to be the format of Girls Inc. to empower local facilitators to run the programs themselves. We encourage them to reach out to professionals in their community, but it's not a requirement of the program."

The lack of professional filmmakers in key roles differentiates the Girls Make the Message program from others in the field, even though their curriculum, which will be distributed to all Girls Inc. affiliates by 2006, is based on many of the same principles as Reel Grrls. Unlike some of the other girls film programs, Girls Make the Message also focuses exclusively on the PSA format, favored by youth media collectives like Listen Up! The advantage of the PSA is that it provides a framework for producing a thirty-second media message. This serves as a manageable segment and can be compressed for viewing on the Web in QuickTime or Windows Media formats. The short side of PSAs can be prosaic preachiness, as in "Just Say No" or "Clean Up Litter," but the best PSAs deliver a creative message through low-budget innovation.

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Some successful examples include Reel Grrls' Can You Look at a Woman Without Judging Her (2001), which explores the ways girls and women are schooled in aggressive female-to-female critique. This piece provides an effective adjunct to the current discussion around female hegemony. Another successful piece Jody, Jody, Jody, produced at the 2004 Divas Direct program, deals with authentic identity. In the video, a chameleon girl "yeses" her friends, telling them she is both a vegan and a meat eater, until they confront her with the contradictions.

WORDS FROM REAL REEL GIRLS

Lori Damiano has been making films, videos, and animations since the age of sixteen. Her work was included in a 1998 San Francisco Cinematheque program this author curated called "Real Girls/Reel Girls," at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in California. Included in the program was her Super 8 animation Strongman, which possesses a garage band rawness in its cartoon-style questioning of male fascination with guns. While in high school, Damiano produced this and other Super 8 shorts and animations at the California State Summer School of the Arts (CSSSA) held in Valencia under the guidance of several Bay Area filmmakers including Greta Snider. She says that her experience in this program "completely changed [her] life's course."

While CSSSA was staffed by both male and female instructors, Damiano says "It made a big difference for me to have women mentors.... I remember being especially affected by Greta and her films.... There was a strength about her that I hadn't really seen in women I had met before.... Her influence really opened things up for me. My sense of being limited because of my gender really dissolved for the first time." After high school Damiano focused on graphic design and animation at CalArts in San Francisco. She recently completed her first feature-length documentary about female skateboarders, Getting Nowhere Faster, which premiered in Los Angeles in spring 2005.