"If Black Panthers and Girl Scouts had a baby, it would be the Rebel Bells." - Pilar Rodriguez
Rebel Bells is a documentary short film about an all-girls radical collective located in the Calumet region connecting southeast side Chicago, Illinois and East Chicago in northwest Indiana. The Calumet region is an economically precarious, environmentally-polluted industrial corridor in the U.S. Midwest. The Rebel Bells was started in 2016 by three mothers who are leaders in the environmental justice movement in their respective communities. The goal of the Rebel Bells collective is to teach young girls about social justice and community activism in an empowered and safe environment. Though they receive guidance from the moms that are involved in the group, the girls take ownership over the curriculum and typically lead the meetings and activities of the group.
The goal of Rebel Bells is to capture the girls and their moms in their own voices as well as to contextualize the urban environment in which the girls and women live, including environmental pollution. In this respect, the film is intended to embody a feminist documentary practice. As film scholar Julia Lesage argues, there is power in feminist documentary filmmaking for helping women to re-possess their own narratives. This film intends to highlight the importance of centering women’s voices that are otherwise silenced in patriarchal society, and within a film industry that traditionally centers men's narratives, including male directors and male characters.
Rebel Bells has screened at the Portland EcoFilm Festival and Better Cities Film Festival, and will screen virtually at Collected Voices Film Festival October 15-31, 2020. For more information on future screenings, please ‘like’ the film’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RebelBellsFilm/.
Works Cited
Lesage, Julia. “The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies. Vol 3, no 4. (1978): 507-523.
FRAMING THE PROJECT
This film is an extension of my academic research, situated in the environmental humanities. My research draws on ecofeminist scholarship to look at representations of race and gender in popular Hollywood climate fiction film (e.g. Mad Max: Fury Road, Interstellar, and WALL-E) as well as to examine how film is part of the institutionalized structure that perpetuates environmental racism. My research has traditionally taken the form of peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters predominantly accessed by other scholars. With this film, I am broadening the reach of my academic research and participating in the construction of a more publicly-inclusive dialogue that articulates both environmental racism and girl’s empowerment.
This film represents a collaboration between myself, as a first-time filmmaker, and veteran filmmaker Anne Colton, who started out in the film industry in 1989 as the only female online editor in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. According to a 2018 study by Stacy L. Smith and the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California, of the 1,100 top-grossing American films between 2007 and 2017, women made up only 4% of directors, 10% of writers, 22% of producers, and less than 1% of composers. Documentary film is frequently seen as a genre more inviting to women; yet, there are still barriers. As Addie Morfoot reports, in the past ten years, only one-third of Oscar-nominated documentaries were directed by women and women still have difficulty securing financial backing compared to their male counterparts. The unequal representation that we see behind the scenes correlates to gender inequality on screen. For example, only one-third of the top 100 highest grossing American films between 2007 and 2017 featured female leads.
Narratives by and about women are egregiously underrepresented. This kind of (under)representation matters because stories told through film matter. Film has the ability to impact material reality, specifically how people see and engage with their social world. This is the foundation for one of my critical-creative practices, the Chicago Feminist Film Festival. Founded in 2016, with Associate Professor Susan Kerns, the Chicago Feminist Film Festival aims to highlight women’s voices in the film industry and beyond.
This is also my main motivation for producing Rebel Bells. With this film, I aim to highlight women’s voices, not just in the film industry, but through film itself. As a project intended to embody the values of feminist documentary, the film highlights the importance of centering women’s voices that are otherwise silenced in patriarchal society. The film combines interview footage with the women and girls involved in the collective alongside footage of the women and girls engaged in their community, including curriculum planning meetings, toxic tours in their respective neighborhoods, and foraging field trips.
Works Cited
Morfoot, Addie (2016) “Oscars: Examining Gender Bias in the Documentary Categories.” Variety.
Smith, Stacy L. et al (2018) “Inequality in 1,100 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBT & Disability from 2007 to 2017.” USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative and Annenberg Foundation.