We Wanted These Stories Heard Loudly: Anne de Mare & Kirsten Kelly On Their Short "The Girl With The Rivet Gun"
Anne de Mare and Kirsten Kelly are co-directors of the short animated documentary The Girl with the Rivet Gun. Being a filmmaking team that have worked together for more than fifteen years, they share a deep commitment to projects that celebrate the transformative power of the human spirit as well as exploring the human connection to social justice issues.
Focusing on three women from vastly different backgrounds - Esther Horne, Susan Taylor King and Mildred Crow Sargent –this film weaves together powerful moments from each of these Rosie's journeys of transformation, which serve as our entry point to a rich, layered, and adventurous rewriting of history as herstory, providing new understanding of this pivotal time in the transformation of America.
This impressive documentary screened at Thomas Edison Black Maria Film Festival 2020 where it was awarded a Jury’s Choice Award and it is now scheduled to screen at Cinequest Film and Creativity Festival 2020. Alongside the female co-directors, the rest of the filmmakers behind this film are all women.
We had the opportunity to chat with Anne and Kirsten about their history, the film, their attraction to the project, empowering women, and much much more!
You’ve been working together for the better part of 15 years. How did the two of you first meet, and what is about each other that helped to form such a long-lasting partnership
We met making theater together in the late 1990s — Kirsten directed a play that Anne had written at the Strawdog Theater Company in Chicago — and we really clicked in terms of our creative work, the stories we wanted to tell, and just as friends and collaborators. Our first documentary began as an idea for a play about Kirsten’s home town in Michigan — the self-proclaimed asparagus capital of the universe — and we decided to help the people in town tell their own story. Being huge fans of documentary and film, and with our visual storytelling background in theatre, we embarked on making the documentary (with help from some extraordinary doc friends). Our partnership has lasted so long because of a shared commitment to the work, a scrappy sense of being willing to chip in and do anything to get the project done, and the ability to laugh through just about anything.
What lured you both to the project, and what was it about these women’s stories that resonates the most with you?
Back in 2010, we worked with fellow producer Elizabeth Hemmerdinger on a video archive for NYU's Tamiment Library Labor Archives, which collected the stories of 48 real-life Rosie the Riveters, already in their 80s and 90s. Working with an amazing historian named Michael Nash we filmed women across the country, including the three women featured in The Girl with the Rivet Gun. We were deeply moved by their stories of breaking barriers of gender, race, and economics during wartime when they were young, and then how these stories were informed by a lifetime of experience. We had never heard some of this extraordinary history, and wanted get these stories to a wide audience and front and center in schools and museums — we wanted these stories heard loudly! As fans of animation, we knew this art form could combine brilliantly with their filmed interviews of today, as an exciting and emotional way to bring pieces of their past to life.
You both have a knack for drawing such candid warmth from your subjects. What’s your secret to getting the best response out of the people you interview?
Spending time with people and really connecting with them before being on camera helps. And our background working with actors live on stage helps us be able to put subjects at ease. Being genuinely interested in the subjects you are interviewing and willing to let them help guide the conversation to what they are interested in talking about. The best interviews are the ones that truly surprise us!
As females working in the film industry, how does it feel to work with a crew made up entirely of women?
Honestly, it feels awesome! With this subject matter, we knew we wanted to focus on employing women artists. And with both the film and animation industries being historically dominated by men, it was the perfect project to make this happen.
The film’s animated sequences created by Danielle Ash really make the short stand out from other documentaries. How did you come into contact with her, and what was the collaboration process like with her?
When we first started exploring using animation to highlight the Rosie’s stories, we decided to hold a workshop with four very different women animators to help develop our ideas further. Danielle Ash was one of the first animators recommended to us, and we immediately fell in love with her unique style of constructed cardboard animation. Esther Horne, one of the Rosies featured in The Girl with the Rivet Gun, was able to attend the workshop in person and talk with Danielle and the other animators directly, which was amazing. Coming out of that experience, we decided we wanted to create a short film using Danielle's animation. We worked together crafting the larger story and individual ideas for scenes, as she created the character design, sets, and literally hundreds of tiny cardboard props. Her frankly brilliant imagination and level of detail were constantly inspiring to us. The actual animation is so labor intensive, especially in the beginning of the process, that she would work on her own for weeks at a time, but it was always such a joy to visit the studio for our story sessions together and see the progress. Once the raw animation started to come in and we were in the edit room with the piece, we worked together much more closely.
I know that stop-motion requires quite a bit of time and patience. How long has it taken to see the project through to end?
It can feel quite glacial at times! We were in production on the piece in Danielle’s studio for over three years, although like many projects, there were periods of time when we would go on hiatus as we waited for funding to come through.
What were some of the challenges you faced interweaving three loosely connected stories into one larger story?
The experience of being a Rosie during WWII brought women together in the workplace in ways that had never happened before — across racial, economic, and cultural divides — and we knew we wanted to make a film that embraced that diversity of experience. Initially, we thought the entire piece would be animation, but discovered that including moments of the actual interview footage with the women was essential — and brought a deeper emotional connection — to anchoring the stories together as a shared history.
What do you hope audiences take away from the film?
We hope to inspire audiences, especially young women and girls, to understand how important women have been to our history, and empower girls and boys alike to see women’s power and worth in the world. There are so many people society often overlooks — especially elderly women — and their contributions to our world have been enormous.
What’s next for you both?
We hope to keep making short animated films that tell amazing, strong, unexpected and often unheard stories of women in the world. We are also working on a feature documentary together around men’s activism to help end violence against women.
What do you think? We want to know. Share your thoughts and feeling in the comments section below, and as always, remember to viddy well!