This is the text of Virginia Heath’s speech on the opening panel at Feminism in London 2010.
Hello everyone! I’ve been asked to speak about women in film and I’m happy to say that there are many more women working in all areas of film making, cinematographers, directors, sound designers, editors… than when I first started. Things have come a long way in a positive direction, but there is still a long way to go. Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman ever to win the Oscar for Best Director this year, and Jane Campion is still the only woman ever to win the Palm D’Or in Cannes. Although these are fantastic achievements, there are still far too few women’s voices being heard in our cinemas and on our television screens.
I wanted to talk a little bit about my career as a writer and director leading up to my latest project which has become a real passion of mine. It is called ‘My Dangerous Loverboy’ and is a multi platform campaign using film, new media and the web to fight against the sex trafficking of young women in this country and globally.
So, to go back to the beginning… as you can probably hear from my accent, I was born in New Zealand and I actually developed a love of cinema from quite an early age. My mother was a school teacher, but she loved the theatre and spent all her spare time producing plays in the local repertory. I remember, as a kid, watching her directing actors and using stage lighting to create powerful visual atmospheres… and thinking this was a very cool thing to do.
My father was a typical New Zealand man of his time and wasn’t much interested in looking after kids. But the one thing he did love was movies. So he would take me and my sister to the cinema every Saturday at 5 o’clock, whatever film was playing. This gave me a great love of every kind of movie genre from comedies to westerns to romantic comedies to thrillers…
But, at that time, very few women were working in film and I didn’t even think of it as a possible career. It wasn’t until I embarked on the adventure of traveling overland, right across the world… and had plenty of time to think about what I wanted to do… that I decided I passionately wanted be a film writer and director.
I had studied history at University, and when I arrived in London, I was lucky enough to be accepted onto a post graduate course in film at St Martins School of Art. It was 1985 and I was fortunate to be studying at a very exciting and dramatic time both culturally and politically.
It was during the Miner’s strike, and alongside making my own personal film, ‘Pandora’s Box’, I joined a group of women students who went up to Kiverton Park in Yorkshire and made two films – one about the injustices of policing during the strike, and the second one, about the impact of the strike on miner’s wives.
Although this was a very tough time for the women in mining villages, it was also very liberating for some of them who suddenly went out on speaking tours all round the UK and Europe. They played an amazing role in raising support for the strike and found that people were very eager to hear them speak about their lives and ideas.
This was an amazingly formative experience for me as a film maker… to be involved in a campaign with high stakes, about issues that really mattered. It opened my eyes to life in a small northern mining village, and although it was a hard struggle, there was lots of humour. I remember the mining family we were staying with, opening the almost bare cupboard, and showing me tins of frogs legs and caviar sent by French and Russian miners… and saying – what the hell am I gonna cook with this?
After I left St Martins, I started working as a film editor, which is a great training ground for becoming a director, and then I was lucky enough to get a job directing arts documentaries for Channel 4 with Bandung Productions, then Faction Films. Amongst many others, I made ‘Songs from the Golden City, a documentary about the story of South African jazz though the eyes of the Manhattan Brothers who were the ‘pop stars’ of Southern Africa in the ’40s and 50′s.
Again, this was an extraordinary experience, making a film about people who had struggled against the most extraordinary repression, but had survived through using their talent and creativity against all the odds. And the humour with which they could tell stories of coming home from gigs late at night, getting busted by the police for not having passes and locked to lampposts, but still joking with each other that they were the ones with the power to entertain and uplift their people… and that one day they would win… It was a truly amazing experience…
From documentary, I moved into fiction, and made a number of short films which have luckily been quite successful. Even though I was making fiction, I was still very interested in investigating themes relevant to issues people face in their contemporary lives. My film ‘Relativity’ which won the prize for ‘Best Short Film at the Berlin International Film Festival, was inspired by a friend of mine who was a single mother with a young daughter, talking to me about the difficulty of incorporating a new sexual relationship into her life. Issues of love, jealousy, sex, competition, betrayal are all great themes to explore in drama. I chose to focus on one funny, shocking incident, a point of maximum conflict, when the mum goes back to bed with her new lover after breakfast and the daughter decides to intervene. We see the same series of events from the point of view of the three different characters. The question is: which, if any, is the truth? The film is both a dark, comic, quirky take on modern family identity… and it also explores the relative nature of truth.
I think it’s true to say that all my work from documentary to fiction, reflects a strong core of ideas and themes. I pride myself on being a feminist, in the broadest sense of the word. I’ve always been ‘left-leaning’, have always been interested in black politics and different cultural perspectives on the world. I think anywhere where there’s some kind of conflict going on, it’s inherently very dramatic and a source of powerful stories. I’m interested in the ambiguities, the dilemmas, the conflicts we face, not in finding simplistic solutions. My films are certainly not moralistic in any kind of way, but they do have a clear political perspective behind them. Above all, I think it’s important to tell powerful, emotionally compelling stories that audiences can engage with.
This very much brings me to my latest project which I think is very relevant to today’s conference, especially in the light of the savage cuts and attacks on disadvantaged communities… and something I feel very passionate about.
My Dangerous Loverboy
The project is called, ‘My Dangerous Loverboy’, and it is a cross platform multi media project which aims to campaign against the sex trafficking and exploitation of young women in the UK and beyond.
The project first started when I was commissioned to make a film and music video by the United Kingdom Human Trafficking Centre to raise awareness about Internal Sex Trafficking of young girls around UK cities. Like most people in the UK, I had no idea this was happening to young women (and boys!) right here on our doorstep. I was aware of cross border trafficking of women into the UK from abroad which is obviously horrific in itself. But I had no absolutely no idea that UK girls, some as young as 12 and 13, were being groomed, trafficked and sexually exploited from borough to borough, city to city around the UK.
This ‘internal’ or ‘domestic’ trafficking is actually well recognized in the US and there is an amazingly powerful film by David Schisgall called ‘Very Young Girls’, which deals with the issue in New York. But, but in the UK, this is still a very hidden crime.
In the process of coming up with a story which I felt would communicate with a teenage audience, and help to raise awareness of this issue, I traveled round the country from Doncaster to Middlesborough to the South East and did a lot of research. I first spoke to the amazing women who run front line agencies dedicated to working with victims of trafficking and sexual exploitation and then with the young girls and women who have been through these experiences themselves. I established a real feeling of trust which gave me access to very powerful, harrowing and authentic stories. Although ‘My Dangerous Loverboy’ is a film centred in the UK, the story and themes are universal and we have had great feedback from teenage audiences around the world, particularly for the music video version of the story which is on youtube and we will play shortly.
The original idea for the film was that it would be distributed into schools to be shown in PHSE lessons, which is great, but we felt this was really missing a trick in the age of mass communication over the web. In collaboration Quba Digital Agency, I argued that if we were to engage a wide audience, particularly of teenage girls, we needed to be communicating online and through mobile. This led us to begin the ‘My Dangerous Loverboy’ cross platform project/campaign. We were lucky enough to win a Cross Media Challenge Award from the National Film Board of Canada to create the My Dangerous Loverboy website:
a youtube Channel http://www.youtube.com/user/mydangerousloverboy
and a Facebook fan page – http://www.facebook.com/mydangerousloverboy
along with profiles on myspace, twitter and deviantart…
Our approach with this project is to raise awareness of sex trafficking through issues of interest to teenagers – love, sex, trust, friendship, betrayal – and we aim to use creativity and imagination as tools to fight internal sex trafficking, whether music, photography, poetry, dance, animation, posters or video.
As a result of my research for the film, we now have a very creative engagement with young women who have been affected by sex trafficking and their powerful stories. An example of this creative collaboration is the short animated film ‘Me Jenny and Kate’ which you can watch on our ‘My Dangerous Loverboy’ website and youtube channel. This is written by a group of sexually exploited girls who participated in a therapeutic workshop at the Barnardos SECOS project in Middlesborough, and drew a story board with stick figures telling of their experience. We animated the stick figures using their exact words and the result is a very powerful and authentic short film… I could never have written the dialogue in the way they did… my favourite line is ‘we went outside for a fag and some fresh air…’
Another exciting collaboration with teenagers is with a group of young art and media students at King Edwards School in Sheffield. They have come up with an imaginative and ambitious project to create a multi media exhibition including art, music and dance in disused shop fronts in the busy city centre. They are determined to raise awareness of the sex trafficking of young English kids amongst the public who might not normally come to an art gallery.
The ‘My Dangerous Loverboy’ project has been an incredible journey. We have people contacting us every day through the site to say how important it is to raise awareness… from girls who have been through this horrific experience sending stories and poems, to parents of sexually exploited kids, to a Red Cross group in Serbia, to the United Nations campaign against sex trafficking… This always fires us up to carry on despite the complete lack of funding for this kind of awareness raising work in the current climate. We are really keen to make links with people or organisations who are doing work in similar areas. Please check out the website, www.mydangerousloverboy.com and join our Facebook page, share the youtube video with your friends, and help spread the word against sex trafficking of young people.
Thank you! And we’ll now play the music video.
Virginia Heath, 23 October 2010