The Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls is a place where 8-18 year olds come from all over the country to learn Rock DIY-style--forming bands, writing songs and building community, and “Girls Rock!” is the movie about their journey.
The primary subjects of “Girls Rock!” are Laura, an articulate adopted Korean obsessed with death metal; Misty, who is emerging from a life of meth-addiction, homelessness and gang activity; Palace, a sweet-seeming 8-year-old with a heavy metal sneer, and Amelia, who's writing a 14-song cycle about her dog Pippi. Forming bands, writing songs and playing a gig in one week, these girls and the rest of the camp engage in an experiment in empowerment that will leave no-one unchanged.
In meeting these four children, the filmmakers discovered what many books and studies have already described—girls are struggling with a bewildering and heartbreaking array of challenges to their self-image. Everything from eating disorders to drugs to sexual harassment have made girlhood a virtual battlefield. The filmmakers were happy to find in the camp a place where, in the words of former Camp Assistant Director Jen Agosta, "it is 100% ok to be exactly who you are." What happens to the girls as they are given a temporary reprieve from being sexualized, analyzed and pressured to conform, is truly exhilarating. The act of picking up a guitar and making noise becomes a truly revolutionary act.
As the final performance for over 700 people draws near, the girls are thrown into a paroxysm of excitement and self-discovery, achieving things they never thought possible. Through video diaries, verite footage, revealing interviews, and issue-driven animations, filmgoers will transform right along with the girls.
Laura (15 Years Old, Vocals)
Seemingly the one girl in her teens who feels confident and has defied the statistical trend toward plummeting self-esteem, Laura comes to camp as a bouncy extrovert and metal fan who eventually reveals that her self-image isn't what it seems.
Misty (17 Years Old, Bass)
When the camp starts, Misty is living in a group home where she's transitioning from 10 months in a lockdown facility. Never having played or even seen her chosen instrument (the bass), Misty finds herself in a diverse and argumentative band where she struggles over taking a leadership role or returning to her old ways.
Amelia (8 Years Old, Guitar)
Deeply immersed in a self-created world revolving largely around her dog, Amelia loves to make noise with her daisy-shaped guitar, unworried about melody or genre. Admitting that she only has one friend at school, she struggles to mesh her wild visions and accelerated musical knowledge with the interests of other girls her age at the camp.
Palace (7 Years Old, Vocals)
Palace finds that her rebel charisma and beyond-her-years-rock-attitude make her a big hit with older girls, while her own band is not so sure. As her troubled nature bubbles to the surface, the camp's Drama Trauma team is called in.
The Filmmakers
Arne Johnson, Producer/Co-Director
Arne has been a film reviewer, entertainment journalist, film festival worker and screenwriter for more than a decade. But he got his real start in movies working with fellow 7th grader Shane King on the Super 8mm classic “Cala ‘n’ Ala Honey Baked”. They collaborated again 20 years later, as Arne wrote the screenplay for Shane’s "Park Files", a film for kids about native plant restoration. Along with Shane, he has hosted a radio show called "Doc Talk", about documentary film. Previous to this life of writing, editing and filmmaking Arne was an educator. He grew up in Portland, Oregon, not far from where the Camp takes place, though he was born in San Francisco. He now resides in Oakland, where he rarely uses the B.A. in English Lit he earned from S.F. State University, making videos for environmental organizations and petting his cats.
Shane King, Co-Director/Cinematographer
Shane has been working as a shooter, editor and producer for the past 10 years. He is now a principal in the production company Keela Films. Shane’s productions have taken him from steamy Amazonian jungles to some of the finest wineries in Australia and countless trips across the U.S. Shane continues to find the time to teach documentary production and Editing at The Film Arts Foundation, The Bay Area Video Coalition and at his alma mater San Francisco State University. His educational short "The Park Files" won 7 awards at the International Wildlife Film Festival. He was born and raised in Portland, Oregon, where he met and started having grand adventures with Arne in the 5th grade. Now Shane wants to make a Zombie movie.
Liz Canning, Animator/Motion Graphics
Liz Canning studied film at Brown University and started freelancing as an editor and animator in 2000. In 2005 Liz cut and co-produced a Guerilla News Network documentary called “American Blackout”, which won a special jury prize at Sundance and has since won 5 more awards on the festival circuit. Having purchased an HD camera, Liz is looking forward to expanding her business beyond editorial and design to include production, direction and writing. The future will also include a return to her personal work and completion of her own feature, “Orphan of the Airwaves”.
Co-Directors Shane King and Arne Johnson Discuss Favorite Q&A Topic
The first thing we are usually asked at screenings is:
Why did two guys get interested in this subject?
What would seem to be an uncomfortable topic is actually a great opportunity to talk about the journey that led us to this film. The first, and simplest answer is that we are huge Sleater Kinney fans, and one day we went to go see Carrie Brownstein (guitarist/singer in SK) speak at an event with the artist Yoshitomo Nara, and she talked about how inspiring the camp was. We called the rock camp, and the rest is history.
But the real story is a little more involved. The camp, understandably, was suspicious and wary. We had to do quite a bit of persuading that we weren’t trying to turn the camp into American Idol. And in the process of persuading, we did a lot of listening. And discovered that the camp was about so much more than just kids with guitars. We heard about transformations, girls who looked to the camp as a lifeboat in the swirling seas of conformity pressure and bands of twelve year old girls that by the mere act of playing made grown men cry. And in that process, we forgot that we were just men, and started learning how to be better human beings. And in a strange twist, we started to see the fact that we were men making the film not as a hindrance, but as a strength. The film would almost be the charting of our experience (though we never appear in the film, of course) of having our eyes opened, and we hope that perhaps that urgency, that sense of sad but also inspiring discovery, will transmit itself through the film.
And so we embrace these questions about being men making this movie, because it gives us an excuse to talk in ways that men don’t usually. This movie was supposed to be about the transformation of these wonderful girls, but in many ways it became about our transformation too.
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