Sundance DocSource

Filmmakers Barbara Attie and Janet Goldwater have been collaborating on feature documentaries since 1990. They received a grant from the Sundance Documentary Fund for their most recent film, Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter. The film recently premiered at the 2009 Silverdocs Film Festival and has screened at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. The central character, Mrs. Goundo, is fighting to receive asylum in the US, based on the grounds that her daughter will be subjected to genital cutting if Mrs. Goundo is forced to return to her native Mali. Genital excision or FGM happens to over 80% of women and is nearly universal in the Soninke tribe, from which Mrs. Goundo hails.

Attie and Goldwater recently sat down for an interview about their filmmaking and history of collaboration ahead of their screening at the Park City Screening series on September 10th.

Q:  What films or photographers impacted you as young people starting out and showed you the power of storytelling? Was there a particular artist who influenced you?

Janet: Barbara and I both have backgrounds in photography. I’ve always been a huge fan of documentary photography. That influenced me in terms of what can be learned from reality. There’s art that interprets and art that reflects reality back at you and I feel like photography really gives me an appreciation for looking harder at reality. And that segued into knowing that can happen in a movie, too.

I loved the classic documentary photographers like Eugene Smith, Cartier Bresson, and really for a time was fascinated by FSA photographers, especially the less know work of Ben Shahn. The photographer that actually opened my eyes was Joel Meyerowitz. I think it was because when he came on the scene using color and large format, freezing these moments in time or places I never thought to stop and look at. So, It was actually a non-doc photographer who had the most influence on me. The other one was William Eggleston. He worked with the small format originally, which was a look at a whole different world. It was a less dramatic world. What about you Barbara?
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Barbara: One photographer who really inspired me, I don’t remember when I started looking at his photos though, was Sebastiao Salgado, the Brazilian photographer. His photographs are so incredibly moving and revealing. They’re exquisitely beautiful and yet show the human condition and tremendous human rights violations. His work really influenced me. Also, some of the same photographers Janet mentioned affected me, Cornell Capa, Eugene Smith, but also I was really taken by the work of Jerry Uelsmann who did work with multiple images and invented new realities from bits and pieces of negatives way before there was photoshop!

 Janet: We also had the “Family of Man”, which was the only photo book in my house growing up. I had every single picture memorized, I just devoured it!
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Barbara: I think it’s true for my household, too! I didn’t come from a very artistic family. We did have that one book. I still remember that one shot, it’s so cliche, but I remember the shot of the two little kids holding hands and walking in the forest.
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Q: You have been collaborating professionally for almost 20 years. What do each of you bring to the table creatively that has made your partnership endure and thrive?
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Janet: Barbara by far brings more technical background. She went to film school and she has no fear of the technical end of things. Creatively, it’s really interesting, someone asked me the other day who do I agree with most when it comes to critiquing movies? Instantly, I said Barbara. If Barbara likes a film and recommends it, I’m going to like it…we seem to have the same needs in terms of storytelling.
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It’s not that hard to collaborate on the actual production. The way that we work is that I like to write, Barbara doesn’t like to write. I do the writing up front after we talk through what our image of the film is going to be. I start writing the treatment and all the grant proposals. Barbara is more of a perfectionist. She then takes what I’ve written and picks apart the problems with it and hones in on the material.
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When we’re in production it takes crews a while to get used to working with us because we see ourselves as totally interchangeable, and at first the crew wants to know who is the boss–we tell them it’s going to be an ongoing discussion. If Barbara gets there first and sets up the shot and starts working with the camera person, I’m always fine with her decision.
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We have a very similar vision but we trust each other completely with those decisions. When we ‘re on a long shoot and we have back-to-back interviews all day we simply take turns knowing the other one will do just as good a job. We’re there to support and to push each other a little bit.
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Barbara: We work so well together. We collaborate. Ego never seems to be an issue with either one of us.
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Janet: She’s serious! We never get offended when another one makes a suggestion to other about what we’ve done. We’ve long since stopped being nice to each other. All that “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but that’s not a good idea…” We can say comfortably that’s a bad idea, move on. Not worrying about being nice to each other goes a long way.
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Barbara: Also, so many of our films deal with human rights issues and women’s issues and politically we’re totally on the same wavelength with our commitment to making films that say something to the condition of women.
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Q: Documentary filmmakers can have very personal and very different definitions of what a documentary should do in the world. Whether it’s art for arts sake, activist filmmaking where your film is a tool for change, etc.. How do you see your films functioning in the world?
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Janet: Our first film, Motherless: A legacy of Loss from Illegal Abortion, is still shown widely in classrooms and for organizing purposes in reproductive justice circles. So for over 15 years, we’ve intermittently attended screenings of this modest, half hour movie that was our first collaborative effort. So every time I see a new group of young women–and men–absorb this information and react to it, it continues to remind me of the power and potential for documentary.

We’ve only made one film, Landowska: Uncommon Visionary, which didn’t deal with human rights issues or directly have any political content at all and to me it was the least satisfying. I don’t mean it was not a good film, but the least personally satisfying. A lot of people were convinced the central character was a lesbian but we didn’t really end up exploring that discussion in the film and project ended up feeling personally unsatisfying. Once you realize you’re not going to get rich, you’re not going to get particularly famous making documentaries the reason for doing it, for me, is the connection to people’s lives and actually being able to make a difference.
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Barbara: Lots of people propose projects to us but if it doesn’t have an advocacy component to it, we don’t generally respond. We want our films to have a POV and a message as well as telling a story because as Janet says if we feel there is an activist or advocacy component we feel more personally satisfied.  In documentary film there is so much rejection and discouragement along the way, just finishing a film is difficult. I need to know there is a reason I’m doing it.
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Q: You both are politically active outside your filmmaking careers. How influence does your work outside film on women’s issues have on your filmmaking?

Barbara: Both Janet and I work on women’s reproductive health issues. Janet was chairman of the board of the Women’s Medical Fund and is on several other boards and I’m on the board of Planned Parenthood and chairman of the board of an organization that deals with battered women. I don’t know if Janet would agree with me but I’m actually a fairly shy person. I don’t particularly love the limelight, but I try to do social advocacy work. So I guess I relate to women who are trying to find their way to make a statement but aren’t particularly “out there.”

Janet: The organization Barbara is talking about is an organization that defends battered women who have killed their batterers and are in jail. And the group that I work with pays for abortions for women who can’t afford them. These are probably the least enfranchised people around; people whom society and even most charities have really forgotten. In order to care about individuals, women who are sitting in prison because they killed their partner (who battered them), you really have to listen to those stories. We wouldn’t be involved in these sort of marginal issues if we weren’t interested in hearing these sort of stories that happen every day. I guess the two do go together.  Even with Mrs. Goundo, we were worried that her shyness and lack of assertiveness on camera might not allow her to develop into enough of a strong character but in fact that characteristics became an asset in that she was someone an audience could relate to and say “she’s just like that lady I see on the street taking her kid to school.”  She’s soft-spoken and shy and became an advocate for herself and her children. She was willing to do this knowing it could help other people.
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Q: You also go to great lengths not to demonize one side of the issue of genital cuttng in the film and you present a range of voices.

Janet: As we came to understand Goundo’s life and spend more time in her area in Philadelphia, spending time with the Malians there and traveled in Africa. Once you immerse yourself in someone’s reality it’s impossible to demonize it. What we ended up doing was building context to explain some of the things that she wasn’t articulating (about her experience of genital cutting).

Barbara: One of the things we found interesting about Goundo is that while she is against the practice, she deeply misses her country and longs to be back in Mali. Once her parents started calling her to tell her to bring her daughter home, she had to confront the issue, but if it wasn’t for her daughter, she’d go back. She’d really rather be living in Mali.
We also didn’t want to demonize the people in Mali continuing this practice. We want people to understand that there are really negative consequences to genital cutting but not say these people don’t love their daughters. It’s a really complicated issue.
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Q: Were there films or artists (filmmakers, photographers, writers) who inspired you while making Mrs. Goundo’s Daughter?

We looked at Kim Longinotto’s film The Day I Will Never Forget. People say there are a lot of films out there but we couldn’t find a lot. Interestingly, our distributor, Women Make Movies, has what I consider to be a really interesting history of films about FGM. They have Alice Walker’s film (Warrior Marks) which was really the first really significant film made on the issue, and for which she got incredible push back. And then Kim Longinotto’s, which takes a different approach but avoided a lot of the problems Walker’s film had in terms of inserting herself into the film. An outside voice saying “how can you do this?”  Kim steps back in her style.  Our film is trying to look at what’s going on in the discussion of FGM, not line up a lot of people to show how bad it is but look at the discussion and try to figure out where it’s going.