Vancouver International Film Festival documentaries focus on the unflinching work of three fearless female photographers

A severe anorexic struggles to choke down a birthday cupcake while her fellow eating-disorder-clinic patients coax her on. A baby lies, screaming, exposed in the sun, while his schizophrenic grandmother sits distracted in the nearby shade. And an Indian transsexual accosts two young lovers on a Mumbai beach, threatening to show them his mutilated crotch if they don't cough up an offering of rupees.

What links these disparate images is both their emotional impact and the startlingly intimate access the camera has to the subjects. Thanks to three of the most probing, brutally honest female photographers working in the world today, these images are the focus of a trio of fascinating documentaries debuting at the Vancouver International Film Festival over the next few weeks. Thin, a vérité exploration of women in an eating-disorder treatment centre, is by celebrated American photographer Lauren Greenfield. The other two are movies that follow artists as they shoot: Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project focuses on Gearon's work documenting her mentally ill mother and three young children in the U.S., while Between the Lines: India's Third Gender tails Delhi photographer Anita Khemka as she cracks the secretive, feared subculture of the outcast hijras: transsexuals who work as prostitutes or beggars. All three women have a unique ability to win the trust of their subjects and to bare inner anguish””sometimes even their own””in the process.

As a photographer, Greenfield has made her name gaining access to her subjects' most private torments. Her widely distributed photo book Girl Culture captured children, teens, and young women hiding out in their bedrooms at home, pushing themselves into clothes in mall change rooms, and measuring their fat at weight-loss camps. Included in the collection were portraits of girls with severe eating disorders, which not only introduced Greenfield to Florida's Renfrew Center but also made her want to explore this most extreme obsession with body image on a deeper level. HBO encouraged her to make a film on the subject, but nothing could prepare her for the work it would take to build the trust needed to shoot Thin, her first documentary.

Eating disorders are, by nature, secretive rituals, and Greenfield would be shooting people while they were riding the ups and downs of a debilitating mental illness. “This population is difficult to get to know and gain the trust of,”  Greenfield explains from her L.A. studio, where she's currently juggling photo projects along with caring for a four-month-old baby. “These people have a lot of issues about image, and as a person who's in a profession of being an image maker, that makes it hard. And at the same time, these are people in the middle of a life-and-death experience. It made it so that at points, it seemed like maybe this film couldn't even be made.” 

But Greenfield persevered, for two years before she could even start shooting, to convince the staff at the centre that it could be done, and to secure the permission of the four women around whom she would base her first film. “Once everyone was onboard, we just started, and it was really a day-by-day process of earning your access. I worked with a really small crew, and I made sure it was an all-female crew, and they sort of had to make their own relationships,”  she says. “With the film, my relationship with my subjects was so much more intense [than with photos]. It was because I was with this really small group of people over a long period of time; I spent 10 weeks there shooting over a six-month period, so I lived there in a pretty extensive way.” 

The result is a film that captures the disease in all its ugliness and complexity: “blind weigh-ins”  where the girls are forbidden from looking at the numbers on the scales; the unbearable discomfort of mealtime in the cafeteria, where patients pick awkwardly at lettuce they're required to eat; and Big Brother–style room searches for stashed food and other contraband. In what may be Thin's most unprecedented footage, girls who fall off their treatment actually allow Greenfield to shoot them purging.

Thin dispels myths about the disease as a diet gone bad. Even Greenfield went through a learning process. “I think I really didn't understand what it was about and how it functioned. I kind of came there out of Girl Culture and out of our obsession with the body and body image, and when I was at the centre, I saw it was a serious mental illness, an addiction, and a coping mechanism like drugs or alcohol, something girls used to numb their pain and not have to deal with issues.”  Greenfield pauses and adds: “I feel like I kind of came at it with more of a superficial take on it and discovered the heart of darkness.” 

She was deeply affected by the frustrating tenacity of the disease, and she experienced the emotional toll of watching her subjects in anguish. All were allowed to turn off the camera at any time, and some did, she says, but most wanted to show the real hell of the disease in the hope that it might help others.

Asked if she ever felt like putting down the camera and trying to stop one of the women from hurting herself, Greenfield compares her job to that of a war photographer shooting a famine victim who's dying in a relief camp. “I feel like I'm doing my job as a documentarian, although it doesn't feel like a job””it's a very intense relationship I have with the women. But my purpose was not to be a social worker. There's nowhere these girls could be that would have more trained psychological and medical help than they did at the Renfrew Center.” 

What Greenfield does hope to do is promote discussion with her film. In aid of that, she's launching a Web site (www.thindocumentary.com/) in mid-October and is publishing a photo-and-interview book called Thin that looks at the lives of her four subjects and many others in more detail. She hopes to have copies of it with her when she travels to speak at the VIFF (during screenings October 10 and 11); she's also organizing a touring photo exhibit that starts at the Women's Museum in Dallas this February. But as much as photos are a big part of her Thin project, Greenfield says she felt film was the only way to truly explore the issue of eating disorders. “A place like Renfrew could be very limiting to photos, and it's such a psychological illness that you really need a voice. And that's a really good metaphor for the illness: the women who have the disorder are learning to find their voice and not just expressing themselves through their body image.” 

TIERNEY GEARON DIDN'T have to work quite as hard to gain intimate access to her subjects. The artist, who is also a star commercial and fashion photographer, has spent the past seven years documenting her own children and mother. Her intimate, colour-drenched photos have a surreal edge that sets them apart from everyday family snapshots: children stand naked on the beach, gazing through doe-eyed doll masks; a grandmother in a macabre skull mask and crazy-paisley dress crouches in a green field as a wailing baby looks at her; or the artist herself straddles her mother's lap and plants a wet kiss on her mouth.

Her series never started as a way to achieve artistic recognition; it was instead a personal way for her to explore her own issues around motherhood. But all that changed dramatically in 2001, when London's prestigious Saatchi Gallery displayed several of her photos in a group show. Police demanded the removal of pictures that showed her children, then four and six, naked, and a heated controversy exploded.

The photographer was tormented by the debate over pictures she never saw as anything other than natural, loving family portraits. The issue led her to rethink her role as a parent, and to go back to the tumultuous relationship she had with her own mother. Soon after, it also led to two young New York filmmakers wanting to shoot a documentary about her. What she didn't know then was that she was agreeing to let them see her most personal interactions for the next three years””through her photographic jaunts to shoot her mother, who suffers from schizophrenia, in her cluttered, isolated old house in upstate New York to her decision to bear another child at the age of 41. She agreed to be as candid and shame-free as she and her family had always been in her photography.

Opening herself up for the film wasn't always easy, and she had early doubts. “There was a point where I felt so exposed and that I had exploited myself. It was, literally, 24 hours a day of shooting sometimes,”  she says, tracked down at LAX on her way to a shoot in New York, but excited to talk about the documentary. “I trusted them with my life, and you can take anything and turn it into something that it isn't.” 

But Gearon formed a bond with the filmmakers, especially appreciating the respect they gave her mother. She also seems to like that the project pushed her into new realms of honesty.

“Sometimes there's a lot of people who don't want to tell everything, but when you reveal everything and put all the cards on the table, it forces you not to make anything up. You can't ever pretend.” 

Jack Youngelson and Peter Sutherland, The Mother Project's directors, found their subject, and her family, to be immediately, unabashedly open. “I don't know what it was, maybe her children are used to her camera, but from very early on there wasn't the barriers you might expect between us as filmmakers and them,”  explains Youngelson over the phone from his Big Apple home.

Whatever the reasons, the filmmakers and the photographer clearly clicked. Somehow they were able to reveal the painfully personal dynamics that fuel her work and give context to photographs that might be oddly puzzling otherwise. In one scene, elder sister Emilee kicks her little brother””hard””in the shins, while their grandmother babbles about the “permanent damage”  it will cause and Mom snaps away furiously: the resulting photo has Michael wailing in the foreground, that shiny red shoe gleaming on Emilee's foot behind him. And in The Mother Project's most affecting sequence, Gearon clearly hesitates, then decides to leave her newborn wailing in the sun for a few minutes just to capture him with his seemingly oblivious grandmother. Later, she breaks down recalling what she's done to get the perfect shot, then realizes the photo is the perfect visual metaphor for the scarring neglect she suffered as the child of a mentally ill mother.

“They could have made a film about a woman's mental deterioration; they could have made a film about my commercial work; but instead, the beauty of it is, they got inside a person's head and saw how she processes her creativity as an artist,”  Gearon says. “It's not just about the clicking of the photos but the whole process around it. Especially for me: all my work is untitled so it leaves something up to the viewers. That was what I thought: God, I hope this doesn't devalue my work!” 

“The film takes some of the mystery away but it adds to it as well....If people are interested in her work, they'll appreciate the extra layer,”  says Sutherland from New York. He adds that he and his partner attempted to reflect Gearon's style in their visually evocative footage. They let everything unfold and waited for moments of the surreal or the emotional to just happen on their own, whether it was amid the icy fields that surround Gearon's mother's home or the cheap motel rooms she and her family would pile into for shoots at different locales. There are no talking-head interviews, and no narration either.

“These are very organic moments that simply occurred, and every time we were surprised,”  says Youngelson. “With so many films, you're standing around waiting for stuff to happen. In some ways we were amazed that there'd always be some remarkable thing that would happen....We had the patience and the stamina to recognize there's something very special about this family....I think there's also the sense for me that the film goes beyond the portrait of a working artist; it's more universal in that it's about family.” 

Gearon, who continues to shoot her children, predicts the film will have her answering some hard questions when she travels here for a screening on September 29. (Youngelson and Sutherland attend October 7.) But she seems to have come to some peace with herself since the Saatchi scandal. “A lot of people are gonna say, 'Is she a good mother?' But I don't care, because I'm just doing the best that I can.” 

FOR GERMAN FILMMAKERS Thomas Wartmann and Thomas Riedelsheimer, Delhi photographer Anita Khemka was their only entry into the hidden world of the hijras. The outcast eunuch community has been an integral part of Indian society since ancient times. The hijras””biological men who dress in colourful saris and wear gaudy makeup””have elaborate hierarchical communities, are believed by the Hindu religion to carry the power to enhance or curse people's fertility, and retain a major role in the sex trade. The filmmakers had heard about the subculture through academic Dorothea Rieker (billed as “coauthor”  of Between the Lines: India's Third Gender), but it wasn't until they hooked up with Khemka, who had shot the hijras extensively for a photo book on sexual behaviour, that they knew they'd found their connection.

“They accepted her as an Indian woman, which is very difficult, normally, for the hijras,”  explains Riedelsheimer, who shot the film in a beautifully gritty style as evocative as Khemka's photos. Speaking from his home in Munich, he explains how the serious, thoughtful Khemka was able to gain access with her camera (and thus with Riedelsheimer's) into hijra brothels, crowded temple squats, bawdy go-go-dance bars, and back-alley castration-ritual hideaways. “As she reveals in the film, her own uncle, who was of high standing, went to the hijras, and she was brought up in this area [of Mumbai]. There was a certain interest in this strange world: it was a frightening one for her but also very fascinating....Understanding them was also somehow her way of finding her identity as a woman. And also, of course, the hijras provoke her in a way as well: they try to be the woman that Anita would never want to be, so they push her about her own sexuality.” 

In her candid discussions with the hijras, she chats about such details as how the castrated members have sex, why so many “heterosexual”  men come to sleep with them, and how the “third gender”  may be less sexually oppressed than India's women. She also comes to empathize with the hardships they go through.

Khemka made the film easier to shoot, but it was by no means a simple task. Riedelsheimer explains that the hijras are part of a mafialike society whose boss they had to gain permission from to shoot. In the brothel scene, there was also the fear of a police raid. “It was kind of a combat thing, where you got in quickly with a rucksack and out as fast as possible,”  Riedelsheimer relates.

Riedelsheimer had to use a small, portable digital-video camera, following hijras as they begged in chaotic traffic for rupees or as they drowned their sorrows at what look like the dingiest dive bars in Delhi. Still, in postproduction, while he edited the film, Riedelsheimer was “astonished”  at the quality he was able to attain: the pink-walled, golden-figurine-filled interior worlds of the hijras mix artfully with the cacophonous colour and fading glory of Mumbai's streets.

The biggest challenge, however, ended up being the subjects themselves, he admits good-humouredly. “The hijras were very exhausting. They were very nice, but they were very extreme and could be very demanding. And in the hijra world, everything is very sexual. I think I had the chance to be married six or seven times in India to hijras....They were always grabbing you from behind.” 

Still, as a true documentarist, he gained a deep respect for them. Like Khemka, he was able to cast off any prejudice or fear, and he was careful about how he portrayed his troubled subjects. Between the Lines (which screens October 1 and 5), like the vividly human portraits of Khemka's that are splashed throughout the film, never exploits the hijras: even during the primitive castration ritual, the camera mercifully pulls out into a dark alley and a man's yelps are drowned out by the clattering of a passing train.

“I love to leave people's dignity; I never want to show them losing their dignity. You really start loving them for who they are, even though you're showing they have problems,”  he says.

That basic tenet of humanity also links the work of Khemka, Greenfield, and Gearon. The access these artists earn shows their subjects' most hidden, intimate moments. What sets these images apart from so many of the photographs we see in our newspapers and magazines is that access never comes at the cost of dignity.