Creating A New Dialogue For Discussing Abortion: Kira Dane & Katelyn Rebelo On Their Short Film "Mizuko"
Kira Dane is a half-Japanese filmmaker from New York who is currently based in Nara, Japan. Having been shaped by two extremely different cultures, Kira is most interested in telling stories that dig for nuance in the overlooked corners of topics. Katelyn Rebelo is a filmmaker based in Brooklyn. Her work sits at the intersection of documentary & experimental film, often exploring stories that reimagine concepts of femininity, politics, and personal freedom. Their short, experimental documentary short Mizuko (or Water Child) provides a comforting way to grieve after having an abortion.
Inspired by a Buddhist ritual to grieve abortions, a Japanese-American woman reevaluates what it means to end her own pregnancy.
This extraordinary animation has received prestigious awards including Special Jury Recognition for Short Documentary Competition at SXSW Film Festival 2020 and Special Jury Mention for Short Documentary Competition at IDFA 2019. We had the opportunity to chat with Kira and Katelyn about their film, tackling sensitive subject matter, exploring personal experience through film, and much much more!
How did the two of you first meet and decide to join forces for this project?
Kira: Katelyn and I were in a lot of the same classes during our time studying filmmaking at New York University. The first time we really started working together was during a semester abroad program that NYU offered in France, where we studied experimental filmmaking under Darrell Wilson, who was really great.
Katelyn: There were a lot of similarities in the things we were drawn to and in our approaches to filmmaking, so we pretty quickly became friends. Our visual styles were definitely different (which we ended up intentionally embracing in the film) but there was something about the story and tone in our individual films that always felt like they could work together well.
Kira: During college, both of us had this habit of trying to do everything ourselves when it came to our personal projects, because we found it really hard to ask people for help. Mizuko was the first film we made after graduating, and it was the first time we decided to really collaborate with full force on something. It was a film about my own experience, and I knew it had a lot of potential as a story, but I knew there was no way I was going to be able to do it on my own. Plus Katelyn already had developed this animation style that worked really well with some of the emotions in the film.
The film has personal origins and tackles the heavy and often sensitive subject of abortion. Did either of you have any fears or concerns about taking on this subject?
Kira: For me, I wasn’t afraid or concerned about it necessarily, but we were really careful about what we wanted to say and how we went about saying it, during every little step of the way. The story was so rooted in my own thoughts and identity that it can’t really be argued with. And it shouldn’t be hurtful to anyone, because it doesn’t attack anybody or any ideology. Katelyn and I always wanted the film to be relatable and approachable to everyone, regardless of whether you’ve experienced abortion or not, regardless of what your gender is, and whether you’re pro choice or pro life or anything in between. We wanted it to be a film that’s not resentful, one that doesn’t attack anyone, but instead says something along the lines of, “Hey, what about this idea?” We wanted to create a space of nuance and healing because we weren’t seeing it elsewhere.
Katelyn: When we first started thinking about this film, we talked about Mizuko being part of a longer series that focused on individual stories of abortion from around the world. I think we realized that making a global project was far beyond the resources and access we had, and that by diving into the nuances of Kira’s personal story we could really explore the very complicated emotional experience of abortion. I don’t think we felt fear when making this film because we were never trying to tackle the idea of abortion entirely, we were just looking deeply into it from a perspective we don’t usually hear.
I think my biggest concern from the beginning was realizing my views of abortion were very US centric, and my knowledge of Japanese Buddhism was limited. I was raised Catholic in Virginia, and was surrounded by a lot of pro-life ideology growing up. So I think going into this film I had a pretty good understanding of the logic behind a Christian approach to abortion (which arguably is what shapes the political rhetoric around it in the US), and was also starting to gain a better understanding of reproductive justice in this country. But it was very important for me to spend a lot of time learning and researching more about practices of abortion around the world, how religion influences these practices, the history of abortion in Japan, Japanese Buddhism, and Eastern vs Western philosophies and aesthetics. The process of Mizuko was a very fine balance of taking all of this and making a film that could resonate with a US audience from all points of the political spectrum, exploring the mizuko kuyo Buddhist ritual, while speaking honestly to Kira’s own experience, and creating a space for emotional healing for anyone that might need it.
Kira, has exploring your past through the medium of cinema helped you gain a deeper understanding of yourself?
Kira: When you sit down and really think about abortion, you’re thinking about all the really big human questions, like the origins of life, what we are in relation to other living things, where the separation might be between our minds and bodies, what happens when we die. So what does it mean for me to extinguish a small and separate life that is also undeniably part of my own body and life? When does it start being a piece of my body, when does it stop, does it ever? Those kinds of questions really pull at all aspects of who you are, and it’s so hard to try and tackle them in a short film, because they can feel so lofty and so personal at the same time. And Mizuko was really about confronting the different ways these questions are answered in Japanese and American cultures.
I had a strong interest in Buddhism before this film, but I’m grateful that the research and thought I put into this film really solidified my sense of belonging in a lot of Buddhist philosophies and culture. So much of Buddhist practice is centered around unifying the separate definitions you have for your mind and your body, and realizing that your idea of self is just a mental concept. One that can be broken down pretty easily, and can’t be delineated from everything else if you really examine it. These are concepts I was aware of intellectually, but it all became much more clear to me when I understood it physically, when my own body temporarily began the process of growing a new person, regardless of what plans I had for myself. So creatively, there was a lot to experiment with there, in terms of showing the lack of distinction between mind and body, my ‘self’ and all other living things, or me and my “water child.”
Both of you wore a lot of hats on the production, from directing to producing to even animating and editing. What was your collaboration process like through each phase of the production?
Kira: We definitely wore too many hats. Katelyn and I co-directed, co-produced, co-edited, co-animated, while she was shooting, and I was writing. That kind of thing works for small scale films in film school, but this was a really ambitious short in a lot of ways. We were juggling so much, so both of us were under an immense amount of pressure. We had a lot of support from our mentors at the Tribeca If/Then Short Documentary program, and we had two additional watercolor animators who put a ton of work into the film, but otherwise we were pretty much on our own. We wanted to use very costly and time consuming mediums. So with our budget, hiring a big team wasn’t really an option. Frame-by-frame animation is something that usually requires a lot of people and it’s really grueling work. And Super 8 animation, while it’s the cheaper alternative to 16mm, is still pretty costly. But using these mediums was important to us, so we decided to just put in the extra work ourselves to make it happen. I’ve pulled a lot of all-nighters in my life, but I’ve never pulled so many all-nighters for one project. We put so much thought into every frame, we were constantly rewriting and rearranging, and we cut so much out. Katelyn sacrificed a lot to help me tell my story. With it being so personal to me, she was always really supportive and understanding, but also stood her ground with her own perspectives when the time was right for that. I think that’s the most important thing to find in a creative partnership, so I really valued that.
One of the coolest things about the short is how it mixes different visual mediums, like live action, stop-motion, and traditional animation. How did you both land on the visual style for the short?
Katelyn: The essay Kira initially wrote was around 20 pages long, and moved in and out of childhood memories, current realities, internal emotions, and across locations and cultures, all while exploring this relationship between mind and body while following her personal story of abortion—so we knew it was going to be a complex film to make. We wanted this complexity to stay intact, while also creating a film that could be accessible, and equally informative as it was emotional. We decided on the visual breakdown pretty early on and knew that we wanted clear distinctions in medium, language, and texture to speak to specific themes in the film. The motivation for having these distinct sections was a combination of exploring Kira’s personal identity, while also subverting the political two-sided argument of abortion in America. Since so much of the film is rooted in a Buddhist ritual, we also wanted to explore these practices and incorporate themes of meditation and the connection between mind and body in creative ways. By the end the two sections are seen in their opposite mediums, and everything merges together, pointing at the inability of dividing anything (views on abortion, personal identity, mind and body) into two clean sides and really diving into and finding comfort within the gray area of morality.
What films or filmmakers have inspired you, your style, and love for cinema?
Katelyn: Maya Deren was probably the first filmmaker to inspire me, and show me the possibilities in experimental, low budget filmmaking. Someone showed me Meshes of the Afternoon kind of offhand when I was 15 and first getting into film, and I think the influence that had on me is still evident in the work I make now.
Over the last couple years I’ve been really inspired by Agnes Varda, Cheryl Dunye, Camille Billops, Karyn Kusama, Ceyda Torun, Celine Sciamma, Eliza Hittman, Michaela Coel and Sam Feder.
We’ve also been able to see so many incredible short films through the festivals Mizuko has been a part of. Some of my favorites have been Cris Lyra’s Quebramar, Nadja Andrasev’s Symbiosis, Carol Nguyen’s No Crying at the Dinner Table, Crystal Kayiza’s See You Next Time, Charlotte Müller’s No Man’s Land, Camilla Kater’s Carne, and honestly so many more.
Kira: Some filmmakers and animators: Don Hertzfeldt, Hayao Miyazaki, Michel Gondry, Hiro Murai, Donald Glover, Carlos López Estrada, Masaaki Yuasa, Pendleton Ward, Jordan Peele, Eric Wareheim, Cyriak, Caleb Wood.
Some specific documentaries: The Work, Do Not Resist, Honeyland, Minding the Gap, Risk, Weiner, A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, Sing Me a Song.
Some specific fiction/animated films: The Midnight Gospel (Duncan Trussell is my biggest obsession right now), Harold and Maude, Dog Day Afternoon, Tampopo, Waking Life, Arrival, Whiplash, Blindspotting, Blade Runner, Triplets of Belleville, Troll 2.
And I second all of the shorts that Katelyn mentioned!
I know animation can be incredibly time consuming. How long did it take to complete the film?
Katelyn: All together it took around two and a half years to complete. The first year and a half we were both working in our free time. Kira was writing the essay while we were researching, testing animation styles, and applying to grants. After we won a grant from a pitching competition at Tribeca, we spent the next year “in production.” This consisted of a pretty intense four to five month period of animating to begin with, and then dedicating some time to film the scenes in New York and Japan while finishing the rest of the animation. The edit pretty much happened throughout the entire process — we were creating new animation sequences and filming new things up until the very end.
What do you hope audiences take away from the film?
Katelyn: I think there were a few obvious things we hoped audiences would have when walking away from the film. We wanted people to become aware of the mizuko kuyo Buddhist ritual in Japan, and to also create a new dialogue for discussing abortion in this country outside of the political context it usually exists within. On top of that though, we wanted to create a space for people to feel comfort in grieving, and vulnerability, and the ability to emotionally process an experience that is so often categorized as “just another surgical procedure” or “murder” and nothing in between. Some of the research I had done before we started making this was looking into personal narratives of people moving between being “pro-life” and “pro-choice” in the US. A pretty consistent experience I noticed was people becoming “pro-life” only after having an abortion themselves. There were so many stories of people feeling immense sadness or guilt after having an abortion, and we thought a reason they turn to being against abortion entirely is because there aren’t really any resources or outlets to understand these emotions outside of the anti-abortion rhetoric. And at a very basic level what we wanted to say with Mizuko is, it’s okay to feel! It’s okay to grieve if you need to. Having an abortion is made up of so many personal and individual decisions, and we should allow space for these emotions in a way that doesn’t judge someone else’s choice.
Kira: Even though mizuko kuyo was undeniably formed by and tailored to Japanese Buddhist culture, I think the thoughts behind it are absolutely accessible to everyone. So many Americans are so tired of seeing the pro life vs. pro choice debate over abortion in such a rigid political context, to no end. While a political debate is obviously necessary, this debate clearly isn’t getting anywhere because people aren’t really talking or listening to each other. People in the political debate continue to feel absolutely determined to say abortion is either murder on one end, or a the surgical removal of a cluster of lifeless cells on the other end. If you want a clean political answer to determine legality, it cannot be anything in between. So these people want to draw a clear and collective line between life and death. Whether it’s at the moment of birth, at the moment of conception, at the first beat of the heart, at a certain number of months along the pregnancy. And then they expect everyone else to agree on that very arbitrary moment. Which is ridiculous. That’s why I think the nuances of mizuko kuyo have the potential to reach a lot of people who are yearning for that kind of nuance in the US. I wanted our film to admit to my purposeful act of ending a life, as well as the acknowledgement of the guilt and pain that came from that form of killing. But I also acknowledge the fact that this life was barely formed, and a part of my body, and part of an all encompassing, never ending tide of life. So that maternal and self inflicting act of killing can’t be compared to any other act of killing, or any other act at all. It is such an incomparable experience.
The debate of whether or not a fetus counts as a life is so frustratingly simple to me. Small forms of life all around us and inside of us are constantly being created and destroyed. Human cells make up less than half of our bodies. There are all kinds of new understandings about how the microbiomes in our gut might influence our thoughts and emotions. For every human gene, there are three hundred and sixty microbial genes that make up a person. Our bodies, and consequently our selves, are more like a system of complex coral reefs that are teeming with microscopic life and thriving on destruction and death. So we really cannot separate our bodies from the rest of the world. I don’t think people should feel like they need to be devoted practitioners of Buddhism to relate to the idea that there are no true barriers between all forms of life. Science is catching up with what Buddhists have known for millennia. And on top of that, I think what people really gravitate towards is this idea of performing a ritual to heal after a painful experience. There’s a kind of closure that comes from ritualistic acknowledgement of an experience that you can’t get through speech or writing, because it’s something you’re doing with both your mind and your body. You’re creating a physical space for it in your life. More people should feel open to doing things like that in the US, and finding their own ways to mourn if they need to, regardless of their religious background. Before the pandemic, Katelyn and I were talking about organizing mizuko kuyo events in the US, where people who’ve experienced miscarriage or abortion can make their own clay statues. And it’s still something I would love to organize one day.
Do you have any other projects in the works that you can share with us?
Kira: I’m close to distributing another film I finished earlier this year, called Horimono: Japan’s Tattoo Pilgrimage. The film follows a group of individuals with traditional full-body tattoos — members of a very private brotherhood with a history of more than 150 years — as they make their annual pilgrimage to a sacred mountain shrine where their tattoos can be openly shown and celebrated. I moved to a rural area in Western Japan after completing Mizuko, and I’ve had a lot of ideas for potential films to make here, but they’re all still early in development. Katelyn and I formed a production company to make Mizuko called One Eyed Productions, and we’re both hoping to continue to establish a style with hybrid documentaries that incorporate animation and experimental forms of filmmaking.
Katelyn: Before COVID I was set to make two short documentaries this year as a Creative Culture Fellow through Jacob Burns Film Center. For obvious reasons though we weren’t able to begin production, and those films will likely be finished in 2021 instead. Right now, I’m using this time to rethink approaches, research, and figure out when and how production can happen safely. Like Kira said, I think we’re both really excited to continue making more experimental documentaries, and will hopefully one day be able to make something together again.
What do you think? We want to know. Share your thoughts and feelings in the comments section below, and as always, remember to viddy well!