Wow, what a week! After all this waiting and wondering and editing and fretting and nervousness, our World Premiere at Hot Docs in Toronto was a wonderful success! The audiences really responded well, and we got nothing but good reviews. People coming up to us on the street and thanking us, that sort of thing. Was really great to finally sit down with a large group of people who didn't know us or the camp or anything, and watch them laugh and gasp and whoop at the film. One of the coolest things was how much of the audience for our first screening were mothers (and dads) and their 8-13 year old daughters. We've been consistently surprised at how much younger girls in the 7-9 year old range enjoy the movie in our smaller screenings, and seeing the family crowd show up was very gratifying.

If you'd like to feel like you were there, you can check out our Q&A here (as well as a nice review!).

We also got a very cool mention in Variety!

Now, we're getting ready for our even bigger U.S. Premiere at the Seattle international Film Festival over Memorial Day Weekend! Not only will our premiere be at the very cauldron of musical movements that influenced the Rock Camp, but all four of the girls we focused on in the movie will be there! Plus, a bunch of camp staff, other alumni and the extended camp family. It was looking to be so festive, we decided to have a big party/concert to celebrate, and thus was born the third edition of Girls Rock Fest.

Our two screenings at the Seattle International Film Festival will be May 25 at 7pm and May 27 at 1:30pm, go to www.seattlefilm.org to buy your tickets!

In honor of the US Premiere of "Girls Rock!", this Girls Rock Fest will feature girls from the movie rocking it live, and other bands with women. See the 10-year-old Amelia's band King belt out their anthem "We Will Destroy our Destination" and Blubird (12-year-old duo) sing the ineffable line "Bush is such an idiot, why won't he sign the Kyoto Treaty!" alongside upcoming bands like Raining Jane. Most importantly, the all-ages show will also feature a music experimentation area run by the camp, where girls will be encouraged to try out guitars, effect pedals and other fun noise. It'll be like a mini-rock camp! They will also be encouraged to come on stage and try out the drums between bands. alot of this equipment, along with a guitar to be raffled, will be donated by the great folks at Fender. There will be special surprise appearances we're not ready to announce yet.

You can see how it exciting (and youthful!) it was when we did a similar event in San Francisco:

http://www.girlsrockmovie.com/assets/GirlsRockFest.mov

The Initial Lineup:

Rock Camp House Band (featuring 8-year-old Palace's scathing "San Francisco Sucks Sometimes" and other treats)

King

Blubird

Raining Jane

Diamond Cut Diamond

May 26 @  Chop Suey

1325 E. Madison

http://www.chopsuey.com

Admission: $10 (or more, it's a benefit!)

Doors 1:30pm

Show 2pm-5:30pm

Tix are available on www.ticketweb.com

So, we're now finally allowed to announce our next big festival, and we're having our U.S. Premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival!!! We had several big festivals interested in that U.S. Premiere, but we (or really, or wonderful distributor Ken at Shadow) are planning on releasing the film in the NW early in the process, so Seattle (aside from being a great festival) was the perfect choice. We were so happy when they selected us, especially since Seattle/Olympia was one of the primary birthplaces of the Riot Grrrl movement and other amazing empowered rockers like Kim Gordon! Most of the girls will be there, and there'll be a big Girls Rock Fest concert and event, so if you live anywhere in the area don't miss it! We don't know our exact screening times/dates, but it will be somewhere on the Memorial Day weekend (May 25-28).

I can't believe we actually get to say that! We finally are being allowed to announce to the world that we've been "acquired" or "picked up" for distribution by Shadow Distribution!!! They're a very cool company, and were the only distributors that we targeted. In our first conference call with them, before talking about money or anything else they asked if they could show it to an organization down the street from them called Hardy Girls, Healthy Bodies. So amazing and wonderful to not have to argue with your distributor about how important it is not to exploit the girls in the movie.

Now, a lot of you are probably saying "Hunh? What's a distributor?" I know that is the case, because we get this all the time from folks not in the movie biz. We say "Hey, we got a distributor!" And they just look kinda bored and say, "Really? Cool." I think lotsa folks think that when you make a movie, you just hand it over to the movie theater and they play it, like "Well, of course it's going to be in a theater, why else would you make a movie? Duh!"

Truth is, we are extremely lucky and it's a great validation to get a company like Shadow, willing to take a risk and open our film in theaters all over the country. It's very expensive and a lot of work, and it's estimated by some that 80-90% of movies made never get ANY kind of formal distribution.

Anyway, the movie will start opening in theaters this Fall (2007)!!!

Woohoo!

Also, we were in the NY Times today, though just briefly...but still, the NY Times!

Hello Rockers!

Jeez, have we been busy! Getting ready for our World Premiere has turned into a doozy...Oh yeah, we weren't able to tell y'all about that before. It's going to be at Hot Docs Film Festival (www.hotdocs.ca) in Toronto. We're really psyched about it, it's the biggest documentary film festival in North America, and one of the two or three biggest in the world. There's gonna be industry folks from all over the world there, even Finland (Shane's people...he's excited)! Even more scary/exciting though, they're hosting a special daytime high school screening of the film. We're of course thrilled that a theater full of teens will be seeing the film, but we also remember what it was like to go on those theater or symphony field trips when we were in high school, when you basically laughed at everything or slept through the whole thing. Hopefully, we'll at least keep them from rioting! This'll be our first big test of whether folks the age of some of the girls in the movie will respond at all. Gulp.

There's a wonderful story about us by the lovely and talented Liz Nord (http://www.liznord.com) in the current issue of Death + Taxes Magazine (http://www.deathandtaxesmagazine.com), be sure to check it out!

Now I wanna leave you with a couple extremely nice things folks have said about the movie already (festival programmers, girl org folks, etc) as we send it out to work with people...

"We watched your video, and I personally loved it.

My 11 year old daughter watched it with me, and it had a profound impact on her....I found myself crying a few times. My daughter just sat there bug-eyed at the screen. You've done a fabulous job of capturing many different essences of girlhood here--and it's not perfect or packaged...Thanks for your honesty--and thanks for the honesty of the girls, especially. I feel honored to be allowed this glimpse of their truth.

Since watching this documentary, my daughter has started to ask me questions and point out what girls in the media are wearing or saying or doing. Thanks so much!"

"I made a copy (don't worry about piracy), took it home and watched it with my boyfriend and my two roommates (three of them in bands, record geeks, music writers etc..) and we enjoyed it a lot. It's definitely one of my favorite documentaries of 2006/07 (and I've seen many) but I did relate. The way you intuitively chose those characters, the story behind these girls, the importance of growing up and being a woman, and proving yourself.. we all cried at some point of this film."

There you have it folks, lotsa crying apparently! Who knew?


Arne and Shane
www.girlsrockmovie.com

Hello Girls Rockians!

Sorry it's been a little longer than usual for our monthly updates, but I figure those of you who've been burning for updates have been going to our website, http://www.girlsrockmovie.com and keeping up with our blog and the girls' blogs. Nonetheless, there're a few fun things to tell!

Firstly, we have recently been accepted into a couple really big film festivals that aren't Sundance. We're not allowed to tell yet until the festivals have their own press conferences, but I'll just say at least for a couple of'em we'll need our passports! And at our big U.S. premiere, there's gonna be a concert/event with girls rocking out after or before the screening! There sure are a lot of exclamation points in this newsletter!!!

Nextly, we have finished a new trailer and also a poster as we get prepared for our festival run. Please go to our site http://www.girlsrockmovie.com and check'em out and let us know what your think. Josh at Plazm Media http://plazm.com has outdone himself again on the poster (which will also be our postcard). It's really beautiful, and there'll be stickers too loosely based on this design. As for the trailer, we'll be posting different versions every once in a while, so be sure to check back...

Which reminds me, if you haven't yet gotten an account on www.girlsrockmovie.com and started blogging, you should do so now! The new format where you provide the content has been successful far beyond what we expected. We've been getting steadily increasing page views from more than 30 countries worldwide, and that stands to only blow up once the festival announcements are made (and people come check out the film from looking at the festival program and from media covering the announcement). This is a great venue to let the world know what's on your mind about great girl bands, how women and girls are depicted in the media, or just talk about your own thoughts and feelings. We've had great posts on everything from all-female Japanese pop bands to eating disorders to bad pop role models to a book one of the girls is writing.

Thirdly, as we are planning on freely distributing our shirts and hoodies and such thoroughly at our festival premieres, we'll be taking the order form off our website soon so we can save them for promotional purposes. So, if you've been thinking "hmm, maybe I'll get a shirt but I keep forgetting" you only got a couple days to do so.

Also, finally, we'd like to congratulate Nancy Pelosi not only on being the first woman speaker of the house, but also for having one of the all-time highest approval ratings for a speaker of the house in history. There were all kinds of attempts to belittle her, and all she's done is pass more bills in a week that the public wants than the Republicans managed in 12 years.

Keep up the rawk!

Arne and Shane

So, some good news and some, well, not as good news to report this month...first with the exciting news.

As we mentioned in our last newsletter, we've been working on revamping our website, and the completely new version is now live! The new site is an interactive community blog for folks in the Girls Rock! community to speak their minds about issues/music/news that effects girls. Or, if you want, you can just have a blog on the site and talk about your life, or your band, or whatever you like! You can still access the old site and see the trailer and stuff, but from now on y'all will also be www.girlsrockmovie.com

Folks who signup for accounts at the site will be required to submit two stories and have them both approved to become full-fledged members, but we're inviting folks like you who're already following the film to have full accounts right off the bat. If you'd like one of these, please email us at info@girlsrockmovie.com with the login name you'd like to have. This is gonna be a great opportunity to share your thoughts with a growing audience! Also, we'll be posting news there much more frequently, as well as our own diaries about the process, this blog will remain a monthly update. So if you want fresh news, check in there!

http://www.girlsrockmovie.com

For the semi-bad news, we found out we didn..t get into Slam or Sundance...It..s funny, cause we don..t really feel that bad. We..ve gotten to the point with this movie, where we don..t really care what the powers-that-be say too much. It..s like when you fall in love with someone and they don..t get a job they want or something. You automatically know it..s the other people..s loss. We just know in our hearts that Girls Rock! has an audience and the two will meet someday. We..ll be happy when we get into a big festival (and would..ve been if we..d gotten into the Dances), but mostly the gatekeeper model is breaking down these days. There are so many ways to find people to see your movie now, and festivals are only one part of that (as opposed to the only way as it once was). I know this might sound like sour grapes, but it really isn..t. I don..t think we..re better off without Sundance, I just think we..re the same. Still have a great movie featuring wonderful and courageous girls and women. How could we not be happy about that!? We were both marveling at how, not only do we not feel depressed, but we feel excited! Like the whole adventure is now really in front of us with the out the giant structure of Sundance bearing down on us.

Hey Folks,

Hope all are well...we're finishing up the film (still!) and now moving into the overwhelming work of getting into festivals and figuring out what to do with the movie. It's a lot of work, but also pretty exciting. Everytime we send off a dvd to a festival, there's a little thrill of possibility opening up. Especially when sending it overseas to a place like the Berlin Film Festival, or Bangkok or Bermuda. We start imagining to ourselves how a girl in Thailand or Germany or Brazil will react to Amelia's "untuned guitar solos" or Laura belting out "a woman, can rock as hard as any man!" Or how about Missouri? We really look forward to introducing folks all over the planet to all the amazing girls and women of the camp, but it's also a little scary!

A couple bits of news...first of all, we're completely revamping our website, and this new version will probably go live by mid-late-November. We're really excited to have a much more interactive site in the works. It'll basically be a group/community blog written by us and the girls and women of rock camp. We'll also be inviting organizations and women musicians and other girls to write for it too...We envision www.girlsrockmovie.com as an online version of the camp (and the movie), a place where girls and women can speak their minds and build community, a place to be heard! If you are interested in having a blog on the site, please contact us and we'll give you more details.

Speaking of being heard, the documentary "Shut up and Sing", about the Dixie Chicks and their lives after they dared to criticize George Bush in public is opening over the next couple weeks. Refusing to be good, quiet country girls, the Dixie Chicks endured a storm of controversy for speaking out that it's hard to imagine a man encountering. Haven't seen it yet, but apparently it's an inspiring story about the power of living uncensored, and you should definitely check it out! You can see more about the film at http://myspace.com/shutupandsing

Anyway, continue to make noise and we look forward to meeting you all over the course of the next year in a movie theater near you!

Arne and Shane

Hello Girls Rockers!

There's not a ton to tell you about on the filmmaking front...we're still tweaking and tidying, while doing test screenings here and there. We're feeling good, and just waiting to hear from Sundance, Slamdance, and some other festivals. It's still stunning to us how you work 14 hours a day, feel like a crazed chicken running around and then suddenly you sit around waiting.

The real reason we're sending this out now, is to congratulate and celebrate the Madrid Fashion Show's decision not to allow models on the catwalk who fall below what's considered by the World Health Organization to be a health Body Mass. In other words, they're banning ultra-thin models, and for the stated purpose of protecting the body image of young girls. While this kind of sweeping rule has engendered complaints of bias against naturally skinny women, the move has had a huge impact in how this issue is discussed. Read below for some of the international reverberations:

New York Times Article

However this rule eventually shakes out, Madrid has brought the dirty little secret of fashion's eating disorders right into the headlines, and we at Girls Rock Productions want to thank them for starting the discussion. Hearing designers angrily proclaim their right to drape fabrics over ribs and poking collarbones is a big wake up call for folks who think this is all just a natural tendency towards a generic idea of beauty. There's something sick here, and Madrid has helped to bring the disease into the light. We can only hope that when girls see our movie, they will have the same realization, that skinny isn't the only way to be, and there are better things for girls to spending their thoughts on.

Hope all of you are healthy and well,

Arne and Shane

Hello Girls Rockians,

Well, we have pretty exciting news...believe it or not, we're actually done with the movie! We have some fine-tuning to do, as well as getting our sound mixed by the amazing Lora Hirschberg, and getting the visuals ready for exhibition, but we're mostly done with our part. We've submitted to a few festivals, and are now waiting to hear from them.

The next stage is to prepare for our festival premiere. This is always a big deal, and you kind of have to wait to do much until you hear back from them, as the premiere is a prized possession in festival-land. Sundance, especially, looms like a giant bird over the proceedings. We won't find out from them till November or December, so we're in a bit of a holding pattern. But once they say "Yea" or "Nay", there will be a frenetic jump into action, including fundraising for the festival showing.

We would love to bring several of the girls in the movie to wherever we have our premiere, but that'll be a somewhat expensive proposition. We've never asked y'all for donations before, but we'd be most happy if you could help sponsor a girl's trip to the premiere. Plane tickets will be about $300. A night's lodging will be $50. A warm hat will be $10. Anything you can give will be most helpful. And any donation over $20 gets you a free "Girls Rock!" shirt, and over $50 gets you a hoodie. Over $250 gets you a hoodie, a receipt for taxes, and a mention in the movie credits! And we'll give a card to each of the girls from all of the folks who helped pay their way.

You can donate here:

http://girlsrockmovie.com/assets/payPal.html

If you'd like to just go clothes shopping, that helps too:

http://www.girlsrockmovie.com/store.html

In the meantime, we've been featured on the covers of two different publications! The Oklahoma Gazette wrote a feature about Laura Walters, an OKC girl who we featured in our movie, and they interviewed us extensively. It's a great article, generous in spirit to us, the camp and Laura herself (who, as we knew, does great interview). We are also going to be on the cover of Release Print (the magazine of the Film Arts Foundation)! Inspired as we've all been by the camp, the writer actually went up there herself and will weave her own impressions into the article. Be sure to get a hold of the issue! Find out more about the mag at http://www.zinester.com/lr/609578/10111701

So, the movie hasn't even premiered at a festival yet, and we've already had three major features written about "Girls Rock!" (including the SF Chronicle piece on the front of Datebook), been interviewed for a column in the Bay Guardian and been blurbed in several publications. Bodes well for the future, we hope!

Anyway, keep on rockin', and we'll let you know when our festival schedule starts coming into focus so you can come see the movie!

Arne and Shane

Well, this latest update comes on a sad day for those of us who love women who rock. Sleater Kinney has announced that they'll be taking an indefinite hiatus. Now, we wouldn't be bothering you with news you'll probably be getting soon (if you're big fans like me, you probably already know) except that Sleater Kinney has been a major inspiration to this film, both spiritually and actually. Not everyone knows this story, but we originally found out about the camp because Carrie Brownstein was speaking at an event with the artist Yoshitomo Nara, and someone in the audience asked her if she thought rock music was dead. After a smile that belied the thorniness of the question, she launched into a description of the Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls that made my hair stand on end. She had just come from teaching at the camp (along with the rest of Sleater Kinney) and said that not only was music not dead, but that she had seen some of the most adventurous music of her life up there. There was something in how she talked about it that made me realize something special and potentially revolutionary was happening in Portland. We contacted the camp a week or two later, and now here we are. Carrie also gave a wonderful interview (in her typically un-star-like way, she came and did the interview at my mom's house, and had my mom's cat on her lap for a good portion of the time!), and helped out again at the summer camp that we shot.

Aside from how they brought us to the camp through Carrie, it was Sleater Kinney that brought me to the place where I could even understand what was going on up there. I don't exaggerate when I say they changed the way I saw rock music, and especially how a concert could be. The first time I saw them, I'll never forget how they just sort of traipsed on stage while the lights were dim and plugged in their own guitars, set up the drum kit, all of that. I just thought they were cool roadies. When the lights did come up, there was a scream of love from the audience unlike any I'd ever experienced. These women were just real. They didn't give a shit about pretense, about being celebrated in some uncomfortable way. What really was amazing though, was when they started to play. I felt like my body was exploding and being filled with sunlight and anger and joy and sadness and everything all at once. When Carrie bounced around the stage, leaping in the air, I was doing the same, without knowing what was going on! And Corin's voice burrowed right into the ancient part of me. The contrast between the women who mosied on stage, and the incredible rock that was pouring from them was an epiphany. Somehow they had included us in something special, an elevation of the tired tropes of rock and roll by making us feel like a community, but one that was pushing to go further than just sitting around and holding hands. By first disarming the rock pose expectations, and then fully incinerating the music with a completely mutual and interdependent wave of riffage, they had made us feel like they were us, not by looking down at the audience and saying they were commoners too, but by lifting us up where they were for just a short while. A place we could all go if we wanted to. I'll never forget that concert, nor the many I went to afterwards. Though not much was overtly said by Sleater Kinney about gender or politics that day, I walked out of there looking at women and men around me differently. Their generosity of spirit, the way they made me feel had upended so many unvoiced preconceptions, that I was reeling, and just a little free-er than when I had entered. As many great bands as I have seen over the years, Sleater Kinney was the first to say, instead of "Watch us. We're awesome", "Come with us. It's better here." And making this movie has been, in many ways, my answer.

"There's no bigger spotlight
than shown on the ones brave enough to live."

-Arne (and Shane)

PS. In film news, we just finished a cut and are sending it off to Sundance and Toronto Film Festivals! We're exhausted, and hardly knkow where we are, but the film is alive and beginning to breath on its own. It's exciting to hang out with it these days.

We've also still got lots o shirts for sale, though some styles are selling out. In case you ain't had a chance to look, check'em out at http://www.girlsrockmovie.com/store.html