Taking Us on Journeys: Kim Longinotto

“Often I end up making a film in a really horrible place, you know, where I don't really want to go, but it's because the story is so good,” says Kim Longinotto, who has shot documentaries about female circumcision in Kenya, the Iranian divorce system, and prejudice against lower caste women in Utter Pradesh, to mention just a few. But I’m speaking to her the week of Valentine’s Day, just before the release of Love is All, a sometimes euphoric, sometimes tragic chronicle of relationships made entirely from clips of British cinema history, scored by Richard Hawley. “It was a one-off,” she reports. “I absolutely loved doing it – I loved not going anywhere, I loved being in London, and looking at loads of archives.”

Love is All was hardly heard amid the din of Fifty Shades of Grey, which was released on the same day and gained the all-time opening box-office gross for a female-directed film. Longinotto is too prolific for her work to be subsumed by the mass-market though: her new film, Dreamcatcher, which won the award for best documentary at Sundance, opens in the UK in March and both screen at Glasgow Film Festival. From a lush archive film to a handheld camera on the streets of Chicago, what both these films share and have in common with all Longinotto’s work are windows into extraordinarily unique times and places, and a fascinated concern for people making do when they’ve been marginalised by society.

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“Often I end up making a film in a really horrible place... but it's because the story is so good” – Kim Longinotto

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“I fell in love with Brenda,” she says about the subject of Dreamcatcher. A former prostitute and now an inspiring tower of warmth, Brenda Myers-Powell runs a foundation that helps streetwalkers stay safe or change their lives, and counsels schoolchildren to avoid getting on that path. Brenda is frank about the lows of her own life, which culminated in being knifed and having facial reconstructive surgery. Experiences of growing up around prostitution and being sexually abused are heard from all the sex workers in the film, and in one extraordinary scene, several girls from Robeson High School open up on camera about having been sexually molested themselves or having to protect family members from the same crime. “Brenda's lost for words and a bit shocked,” remembers Longinotto. “Because she'd been with them for two years at that point and none of them had come out.”

Longinotto is an effusive, inquisitive filmmaker who gets people to reveal astonishing personal information. What’s her secret? “I don't really like the idea of your persuading someone – that feels a bit weird to me,” she says. Nor does she slink into the background: “I'm very against this idea of 'fly-on-the-wall,' which is a horrible phrase anyway. Or being purely 'observational,' this silly idea that, you know, you say to people, 'Don't look at the camera.'” 

Rather, she wants her subjects to know that her camera is there to share their stories with the world. An anecdote from Dreamcatcher's production illustrates this point. Logonotto tells me that one of the school girls in the film said to her, “‘It's like a journey we're going on together. We're going to enjoy it. I did it for you.’ And what she meant was the audience who are going to watch it and there's a point in saying it. And it was really exciting when they said that, and then after that I thought, Oh my God, I love making films – it's so wonderful when that happens.”