Documentary on electronic music celebrates female artists
Documentary about seven electronic artists celebrates female experiences
A few summers ago, 30 or so women gathered at Galiano Island for an intense four-day workshop.
It was a collection of musicians, writers, illustrators and animators overseen by the directors of Amplify Her, a documentary that would later become a multi-platform project including motion comics and a graphic novel thanks to the preliminary work done on the B.C. Gulf island.
It sounds like an ideal environment for women artists, a celebration of female empowerment and creativity. And, by all accounts, it did turn into a powerful and productive four days. But, initially, some of the participants were more than a little wary.
“To be honest, there was a lot of trepidation going into it, and outright fear,” says Mya Hardman, a Calgary-born musician and DJ who performs under the name AppleCat, in an email to Postmedia. “Women in most industries — music, film, writing, animation, etc. — have been taught to see each other as competition, under the false understanding that there is a scarcity model present, and there is only so much room for women to advance.”
It’s an idea that comes up more than once in Amplify Her, a documentary about seven female electronic-dance artists that will screen Thursday at the Globe Cinema. Co-directed by Nicole Sorochan and Ian MacKenzie, the film would eventually bring together more than 20 women in key creative roles — as writers, illustrators and animators — to tell the stories of seven artists making waves in the male-dominated world of electronic music. Alternating between traditional documentary and animation, it’s filled with drama, humour, great characters and some fantastic music. It also eventually transcends its subculture setting to ask a universal question: “What is unique about feminine expression and how might we all benefit when it flourishes?”
Having a team of women tell the stories of women may not seem like a novel concept, but those four days on Galiano Island seemed to indicate the opposite.
“It was some of the first times that any of the women there had ever worked on a project with other women peers in collaboration,” says Sorochan, an Edmonton native who also co-owns the Victoria-based creative agency, One Net Inc. “That’s really scary to think about in 2017. It was definitely an interesting experience for a lot of us, myself included. Having not actually worked a lot with women on any project — my background is also in tech — it was actually pretty nerve-racking to stand up and lead this workshop with 30 women staring back at you. This is a really new experience, but it’s pretty fantastic.”
The idea of building a community is a common theme in Amplify Her and there are a number of stories about the struggles women face in the world of electronic music. But at the heart of Amplify Her is the personal stories of the artists. It chronicles how attempts by DJ and producer Blondtron to become an entrepreneur are thwarted by a bias against her sexually irreverent material. The segment on an artist named Lux Moderna reveals her long struggles with a mysterious, debilitating disease. The artist A Hundred Drums reveals how she was bullied in high school and found freedom through music.
But it was Hardman’s story that first caught the attention of MacKenzie, a Vancouver filmmaker who recently co-produced Velcrow Ripper’s 2013 documentary Occupy Love.
Amplify Her chronicles Hardman’s early childhood journey from Calgary to Vancouver, where she would eventually become homeless in that city’s downtown eastside at the age of 15. It follows her on a recent journey to the Burning Man Festival in Nevada and explores her relationship with both her mother and her own young daughter.
Hardman admits she was initially reluctant to show so much of her personal history on screen, but concluded it might provide inspiration for others.
“Sharing our stories lets others know that we are all connected in the struggle and that we are not alone,” she says. “Releasing this portion of my story allowed me to see it as something other than shameful.”
And telling her story, and the six others, using animation allowed the filmmakers and the team of artists to expand the scope of the documentary, adding symbolic, existential and even mildly supernatural and sci-fi elements to their tales. The stories have also been released as a graphic novel and will be released in the new year as seven online motion comics.
“There were just so many qualities that the women had that made them seem like they could be superheroes, from the costume, to the makeup, to the sound, to the performances and the stories,” Sorochan says. “It all made sense. So we decided to do the graphic novel.”
But with music being such an integral part of the women’s stories, it was decided to bring the illustrations to life and use animated sequences in the film.
Music continues to play a big part in the evolution of the film, which has been playing various cities as part of a “Purple Carpet” tour. In Calgary, Amplify Her will be screened on Dec. 7 at the Globe Cinema and followed by a musical after-party on Dec. 8 at Broken City. It will feature an all-female roster of talent including violinist Kytami, who mixes classical and electronic music and is one of the artists in the film.
Still, while Amplify Her is ostensibly focused on the world of electronic music, the personal stories also tell a universal tale about community and the unique power that feminine voices can bring to culture. All of which makes it particularly timely; not only for the stories it tells but for how it tells them, Sorochan says.
“It’s so incredibly culturally relevant right now with everything that is going on with #MeToo and Harvey Weinstein,” she says. “It’s not, I think, shocking to many women to know how prevalent this sort of stuff is in the world and how frequently it happens. But it’s the first time I think that women are really speaking out in solidarity to call attention to it and that there needs to be a change. While the awareness is finally building, the question is what do we do next?
“I think our film is really an example of that. What does Hollywood look like when more than one woman gets to be in a key creative role and work together? We are not necessarily advocating for some crazy pendulum shift in the opposite direction, just this idea of allowing more women to work together and also men and women working together.”