Girls Rock! is a documentary about a week-long summer camp in Portland where girls between the ages of 8 and 18 go to learn how to make music, form bands, and perform in front of a live audience at a showcase. Tonight it opens at SIFF Cinema.

We got to watch the movie earlier this month and loved it. The stories of the girls the filmmakers followed were funny, touching, entertaining and illuminating. The movie, like the camp, is more about the self-esteem issues and the complications girls, and women, in our culture face.

After watching the movie, we sat down with its directors Arne Johnson and Shane King to talk about their experiences and the things they learned spending a week around 75 kick-ass girls.

During the filming, did you feel or know of any times when having the camera was intrusive to the experience of the camp itself?

Shane: We were very conscious of that. We really wanted to let the girls and the women who ran the camp know that we were there to share their mission and share their stories with the world and have as little impact on that precious week at camp as possible.

A lot of it was that we spent a lot of time working with the women at the camp during pre-production and going to meet about a third of the girls going to the camp. So we had a real relationship with a lot of people at the camp. That wasn’t part of our plan, but that ended up being one of our more powerful tools for making them more comfortable with us.
We also talked to the women and the girls and said if you are ever uncomfortable with a camera in the room, give us a hand sign (the finger across the throat) and we’ll stop shooting.

Did you run into that happening?

Shane: A couple of times we had to sit down and say ‘Please let us back in’ because it was slight discomfort that they were feeling. We had to explain that we were totally happy to stay out if they were really uncomfortable with us in there. But if they were just a little uncomfortable with the camera, this is a really beautiful story of what’s going on with this band.

So they let you back in?

Arne: When Shane says ‘slight discomfort,’ it wasn’t slight discomfort with the camera as much as if there was a conflict within the band. The counselors didn’t want us there because they wanted the girls to have some privacy to work things out. They would tend to want us out of the room first thing, because their instinct was to talk to the girls alone. We talked to the counselors and said ‘As far as we can tell, the girls aren’t upset with the cameras around. We would love if you would consider the situation and think about if we are really imposing.’ After that, people did ask us to leave a couple of times.

Shane: We were extremely aware of the tremendous amount of power we were wielding having these cameras and being adults around kids.

Did you originally intend to make a movie about a camp where girls would learn about music and rock and roll and then realize there was so much else happening?

Shane: Yeah. It was an interesting process. The way I first found out about it was I’m a big fan of Sleater-Kinney and Carrie Brownstein was at a conference talking. Somebody asked her if there was any future for rock and roll, and she answered by telling a story about how she was teaching at camp.

My first instinct was less about the girls and more about, ‘What is someone like Carrie Brownstein doing in warehouse in North Portland with a bunch of little kids?’ The big turning point was when Shane went out there and shot some footage of this band called The Ready that was a band of ten- to 12-year olds. There was something that was making people in the audience weep openly. We thought there was something else happening beyond 'It’s sort of cool that Carrie Brownstein’s here.' That was what the rest of the movie was trying to answer. Why are we sitting here crying about this girl singing Keep on Rocking in the Free World? It just didn’t make a lot of sense.

One of the things that struck me was how quickly you started showing the emotional lives of the girls so quickly. It was almost like a sucker punch on me. Was it a lot for the two of you to deal with?

Arne: Part of what you’re experiencing, we experienced and that was part of what we wanted to show in the film. When we first met Laura, she was so funny and smart, extroverted we were like: ‘What is her story going to be? She’s going to go to camp and will end up just being full of great stuff.’ So when she said that she hated herself, it was as much of a shock to us in the moment. In fact, Shane and I had worked out with these other two women who were shooting with us what we called cry breaks. That was definitely one of those moments.

I think why it’s surprising to see is because girls don’t feel that comfortable in other milieu and that’s part of what’s special about seeing inside the camp.

It’s amazing that Laura thinks that way about herself. She seems like a fun, smart well put together girl who is maybe a little awkward but who isn’t when they’re 15?

Arne: That’s sort of the measurement of the depth of the poison that girls are ingesting in our culture that makes it so upsetting. That was a moment for us too. It was like Jesus, even Laura?

What about the younger girls like Palace and Am? The two of them had such good stage presence and were entertaining, but there were times when I -- and I could tell their bands -- wanted to throttle them. So as well intentioned as this camp is to let girls fill the space with themselves, there must have been some effort to reign their personalities in a little bit.

Arne: That’s what so great about the camp. They really find ways to work things out without requiring them to reign in personalities. That’s such a powerful thing. Part of the camp, they really try to get girls at the age before girls are just unbelievably awkward, so they can have a chance to develop these tools of conflict resolution.

Shane: I think the thing that’s really cool about the camp is that childhood is complicated. It’s important that we didn’t show at the end that ‘They’re perfect now because they went to Rock N Roll Camp for girls.’ Girlhood is complicated and it doesn’t mean that it’s all good. Rock and roll is liberating, but not in an ideological way. It’s like a popping open of a lid for people. It doesn’t always make sense and it’s not always pretty, but it is what it is. It speaks to something in us that doesn’t want to be completely civilized and I think, for girls, that’s especially potent because any girl who isn’t civilized is called names.

Tell me about the reaction you get to this movie. Is there a difference between women’s reactions and men’s reactions?

Shane: It seems like the strongest reactions we’ve gotten is from people with daughters, both men and women, but especially women. We’ve gotten passionate, grateful emails from women with daughters. It seems like it’s been a great catalyst for a lot of mothers and daughters to start talking.

The other group that I’ve noticed -- and they’ve got this sort of breathless giddiness, like their mouths can’t keep up with their minds -- are men who are in their late 30s or 40s. I have no idea what it is, but they’re so excited by the characters, the music in it, the mood, that they get excited about it

Arne: I think a lot of them are culturally similar to us and are ready to hand down the burden of being the dominant sex. It may not be completely conscious to them but part of what made me interested in the story in the first place, is that I feel like I don’t want to run the world. I’m really not interested. I’m glad that women want to participate fully. Not only am I glad for it, I feel upset that someone like Laura might be keeping herself from taking over the world. For me it’s having this amazing cultural asset that’s being kept somewhere. A lot of men, they don’t necessarily express it to us, it’s like, ‘I never said I don’t want girls to speak out. We just didn’t know it was a problem.’

Girls Rock! / March 7-20 / SIFF Cinema / 321 Mercer / show times and tickets available on the SIFF Cinema site.

Arne Johnson will be speaking briefly on March 11 and 12 following the 7:30 screenings of Girls Rock!. He will be doing Q&A sessions on March 11 and 12 following the 9:15 screenings of Girls Rock!

Portland Rock ‘n’ Roll camper Marissa Lytle, a sixteen-year-old from Everett, WA, will be doing a Q&A after the March 8, 12:30 screening of Girls Rock!