NewEnglandFilm.com

"On Hostile Ground," a documentary on abortion providers by Liz Mermin and Jenny Raskin is currently in production. A benefit concert to raise money for the film is scheduled for June 10th at T.T. The Bear’s Place in Cambridge. After some creative fundraising, Liz and Jenny had enough money to do their first shoot this past April. The two of them alternate taking sound and getting behind the camera — a Sony VX-1000. Not only do they shoot and record sound themselves, they also edit. Catch their trailer, hot off the Avid, at the June 10th fundraiser. Liz Mermin took some time out from the grind of low budget documentary filmmaking to give an interview. Below she shares her fundraising secrets and some unexpected discoveries about the South.

IF: How did you get the idea for "On Hostile Ground"?

MERMIN: Jenny and I both finished up at the Media and Culture studies program at NYU last year, and we were both looking for something to get involved in. I happened to meet Sarah Weddington, who was the lawyer who argued Roe v. Wade. I was at a small dinner that she was at and everyone was talking about the crises in abortion access and the shortage of abortion providers and the fact that so many people don’t realize that abortion rights are threatened simply by the fact that people aren’t being trained and aren’t learning how to do it. Jenny had also been thinking about this issue because one of her best friends is a leader in this organization called Medical Students for Choice. And then whenever we talked to anyone about the statistics everyone was always so surprised. It seemed like this was something that really needed to be gotten out there.

IF: So you started with an issue and a pretty abstract one; how did you develop a treatment for a documentary based on an issue?

MERMIN: With the rise in violence, and the harassment, the first thing that came to our minds as to how to approach the subject, was to ask why would anyone continue to do this? Doctors have plenty of other ways to make money. We wanted to find out what kind of people are doing this; what would motivate a doctor to keep going? There have been many good documentaries that have talked to activists on both sides and talked to women making decisions, and these were very powerful films. But we felt that the debate had become so politicized that it’s easy to forget that it’s a medical issue. We wanted to bring it back to the doctors who are dealing with it as a medical issue everyday. We wanted to give them a chance to explain in their own words why they do this and we wanted to show what they have to go through everyday.

IF: Who are those people? Tell me about what you’ve shot so far?

MERMIN: So far we’ve worked with Dr. Richard Stuntz. He lives in Baltimore and flies to Alabama every week for 3 days to do abortions at clinics in Mobile, Montgomery and Birmingham. When he decided to leave the South the clinic directors he worked with didn’t think they could find someone to take his place. So they worked out a plan for his weekly visits. He’s been commuting now for 25 years. Dr. Stuntz is 76 years old and his health isn’t very good. But he’s having a hard time finding someone who can fill his shoes. His wife, who is a psychiatric nurse, is very worried about him. They’re an amazing couple. We went to Baltimore and filmed him at home with his wife for 2 days and then we flew down to Alabama and spent 3 weeks down there, following him on his route and talking to the clinic directors and staff.

IF: What kind of choices are you making as you shoot? Are you trying to work according to a particular cinematic style, or do you have a vision about what the film should look like?

MERMIN: We were both trained in the NYU program in observational film/cinema verite, and we were hoping that just by showing the day to day routines of these providers we would build some sense of what they go through. So originally we were planning to avoid set up interviews and talking heads. But that proved to be much harder than we thought because so much of the action was behind the scenes. At the clinics in Alabama where we were videotaping, they were very protective of patients, so the interaction that was available for us to film was nurses talking to each other, doctors talking to nurses, you know, answering the phone and what not, so in the end we shot many more interviews than we expected to. But we did all of our interviews just when someone was sitting where they were sitting and doing what they were doing so they cut in very easily with the verite footage. We’re struggling to find something in-between conventional verite cinema and the typical talking heads documentary with illustrations. We want something that packs in a few more ideas than verite cinema allows; we want to let people make arguments that are a little more complicated than the kind we can get if we just showed what’s going on. So we’re playing formally with figuring out how to do that without making it a talking heads documentary.

IF: Abortion is a very sensitive topic. I would imagine that it’s hard to gain access–did you have trouble videotaping everything you wanted to get?

MERMIN: We had problems with the clinic in Birmingham.  It’s a Planned Parenthood clinic and the director was worried about having us film for security reasons, so we filmed a little outside and we talked to protesters. The other two clinics are run by women who have been working with this doctor for 30 years and basically if it was ok with him it was ok with them. They are both "Southern Feminists," which is a very interesting kind of thing, they’re not like "Northern Feminists" at all, but they really believe in the issue and they believe in speaking out.

IF: So how would you describe "Southern Feminists" from your "Northern" perspective?

MERMIN: Actually, one of the things that the film has really been about for us, is trying to communicate across some of these borders and realizing how differently you have to approach issues like abortion in communities like the South, where the kind of rhetoric that we’re used to up North is not productive. The most striking thing is that religion is very important to everyone, including these clinic directors. They often had problems with organized religion because they felt it was sexist or anti-abortion, but everyone we spoke to considered themselves to be a good Christian. One of the most fascinating things for us, was that the abortion debate almost came down to different ways of being a good Christian: the two ways are caring for people, not judging, being there when people need you vs. not killing innocent human life, you know the standard pro-life rhetoric. So the feminists in the South engage in this way of debating abortion partly because culturally they are invested in the values of Christianity that many feminists in the North are further away from and they’ re used to having a very hard time being heard. So they aren’t out there arguing, they aren’t writing editorials, they’re just trying to do what they do well, and lovingly.

IF: That must have been difficult at first, to adjust to a really different way of being a feminist.

MERMIN: Well, this is an example of how training in anthropology was very useful. We were both familiar with the idea of just shifting your world view and understanding, using different terms and using a different framework. I mean we were struck definitely, when we first got down to the South by the different ways of formulating things and the different manner, I mean even just dress and doing your hair and all the ways that we so obviously were from a different world: the North. And yet, its obvious listening to these women that their conviction and their political drive was as strong as any reminist we knew in the North.

IF: Ok, now let’s talk money. Tell me how you’ve gone about fundraising for this project?

MERMIN: Since we were straight out of graduate school and neither of us had much of a record, we weren’t going to just sell this idea to someone, so we were going to have to take the whole grant route. So the first step was to find a fiscal sponsor and we applied to the NY Foundation for the Arts for sponsorship and we were lucky enough to get accepted. Once we got sponsorship then we just started writing grant applications like mad. And we got a lot of rejections, largely I think because we lacked experience. But we decided that with a subject like this we should be able to raise money. So we planned two fundraisers, one even in Boston and one in NY. We asked a medical student and a doctor to come speak at each event and they talked about what their experience was like and why they were excited about this documentary. We basically sent out a one page treatment of the project, and a little letter inviting people to come, everyone we could think of we sent them to and we asked everyone we knew to think of other people and checks started coming in, it was pretty amazing! We managed to get 10 thousand dollars altogether. We got a hell of a lot of $25 and $50 contributions, a couple of people gave us $1,000, but mostly they were small, it was just the accumulation of everyone we knew, somehow it all added up. We had no idea it would actually work that way. We got donations of food from a bakery in NY and from Bread and Circus in Boston for the fundraiser. Then finally, we got a small grant from the Third Wave Foundation. But the first shoot was paid for entirely by these two fundraisers.

IF: What has it been like working with a partner on this? The two of you shoot and edit and grant write –together you’ve covered all the major roles. Would you have been able to do it on your own?

MERMIN: I don’t know if I’d been able to do this on my own. We’ve been applying for grants all year, we didn’t start shooting until April, and we were both working, the typical freelance TV jobs and just struggling to support ourselves, and there were plenty of times that it would seem hopeless, you know, whenever you get a rejection from a foundation and just the amount of work to fit in around the rest of your life did feel overwhelming at times and just having someone else there so you didn’t feel like you could just quite made a big difference and also just to divide the work up, it was a hell of a lot of work.