Filmmakers Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss tell us about their latest documentary Girls State, which follows their success with 2020’s Boys State.
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue #49.
I put it to Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, directors of 2020’s Boys State and now 2024’s Girls State, that editing their projects must be hell. Since we spoke, Girls State has debuted at the Sundance Film Festival to the same kind of strong reviews that greeted the previous – sibling, if you will – feature, and deservedly so.
Girls State is a documentary following a week-long real-life scheme in the US, where 1000 teenage girls from Missouri come together and have to build a government, from scratch. They state positions, stand for offices, elect their officials, and make their arguments. The outstanding Boys State saw the same task given to an entirely male bunch of youngsters, in their case at a similar gathering in Texas. This time, McBaine and Moss took their cameras to the state of Missouri, where for the first time, the real-life Boys State and Girls State happened to be running on the same campus at the same time.
Furthermore, it was just as the American Supreme Court was about to overturn the long-standing Roe v Wade ruling on abortion law in America.
“It was hell,” admits Jesse Moss, of wrestling the humongous amount of footage into a lean feature film. “I wish it didn’t take as long as it did. There were a lot of characters, more than in Boys State. But it felt important [to include them].”
The characters and their stories interlocked, and mapping that out was a core challenge. As Moss notes, the actual Girls State programme for the week starts lightly, as attendants question the dress code (notably different to the Boys State dress code, a recurring theme) and hang crepe paper, just taking everything in. Once we’re into the early stages of the film, you could be forgiven for thinking that the politics hadn’t turned up, with McBaine and Moss choosing to hold things back at first.
“We’re asking our audience to be patient with that process,” Moss admits. “Yet we’re going to see the girls react to this negatively, so we have to let our audience experience what they’re experiencing.”
He pauses for a second, and adds: “That created a narrative problem for us.”
The problem they wrestled with was how to frame the seriousness of what the girls in the film were ultimately talking about.
“It wasn’t obvious how we were going to do Girls State,” the pair admit, but they knew they had to represent that there’s not parity. That in American government, women are heavily outnumbered by men, hence one key decision to illustrate that with historical photographs right at the outset.
Along with that, they still wanted to buy themselves enough screen time to be relaxed and frivolous before the politics really kicked in. It sounds like the eureka moment was to approach the extensive edit as a Robert Altman film, tracking a sizeable number of characters as they weave through the week.
“Boys State is more like a Rocky. Girls State is more like a Nashville,” Moss argues.
If Jesse Moss struggles with the edit a little, Amanda McBaine is far happier there.
“The edit for me, I love it,” she reveals. A good job, as that’s where the vast majority of time needed to be spent. “We’re very slow. It was a week of shooting, and a year and a half or something of editing. You have to like the treasure hunt of it. I’m looking at many, many hundreds of hours of footage.”
But, as she adds, she does love a puzzle. Getting the balance of material, reaction shots, interviews and suchlike? It wasn’t easy. But it did jigsaw together in the end.
Faces
In true Robert Altman movie fashion, the film gives time and space to a host of different people – with the most of that screen time going to a young woman called Emily. She was someone who the directors didn’t chime with politically, but ended up admiring enormously.
“Emily is perhaps our main character, and I think probably for most documentary viewers, her politics are different from their own, and we’re asking people [to go with that],” they explain. “You’ve seen the film, you’ve seen the trajectory she’s on.”
I have, and I do, and I really don’t want to spoil it. “She holds political views that are probably uncomfortable for some people, and yet it’s important for us to allow her to present them as she does.” They duly give her that space.
“The compass point is our own sympathies for Emily,” they admit. “How do you bring an audience on that journey with that character, who they may have shifting and uncomfortable feelings for? The audience can lose them for a while, but they’ve got to get them back.”
Again, we don’t want to spoil anything, but her arc in the time we spend with her is quite extraordinary to observe.
In the room
Politics in America doesn’t seem like the friendliest of places to be, though, and I do wonder what it’s like for a pair of filmmakers who – appreciating their extensive respective work in documentary features – are in the room as some very difficult moments pan out.
The subjects of Girls State are teenage girls, the people chosen to be front and centre in the film interviewed ahead of filming beginning. Furthermore, their parents also had to sign o on their involvement, and they were shown rough cuts of the film to ensure they were comfortable with what was being put on screen.
“Importantly, these kids are not adults,” says Moss. “I’ve made a film about a Presidential candidate [Mayor Pete], with embarrassing moments that will probably hurt him and haunt him later in his political life, because I captured them on film. But he was an adult, and he gave a different kind of informed consent.”
Not so with youngsters.
“We are parents of teenage girls. We approached the relationship and care of those girls, because we feel a responsibility to them. We were able to show Boys State to our subjects, and that to me is the most ethical way to present your integrity and your intentions to a prospective subject. To share your work, and not so much your words.”
“But my takeaway, and that may be anecdotal [is] that there were plenty of conservative girls who would never have an abortion themselves, but did feel that the government has no right to tell you what you could or could not do with your body.”
Conflicting views are still presented in the film, but tonally, it just feels slightly different. The edit has its part to play there, of course.
“We do make constructed films,” McBaine points out. “We’re not fly-on-the-wall filmmakers.”
But also, the directors noted that the girls themselves were aware of the world they were in too.
“It’s different even from 2018 when we filmed the boys,” McBaine adds. “A recognition, of how much is captured on camera around you at all times. That’s a forever document that will follow you around.”
Curtain up
The Sundance Film Festival was where Boys State launched, and it felt a friendly home for Girls State too. The young subjects of the film were invited to the premiere.
“We sat behind them when they watched the film, and they were very emotional. We had shared the film with them, they had seen it. This was not a surprise with the content. What was new was sitting in a theatre, watching it with other human beings. The shared humanity of it all. You don’t, on a laptop, hear a laugh and feel a connection. They were holding hands, sitting in a clump, and that was amazing to watch. They were all having a shared experience, as different as they are, and supporting each other.”
I put to the pair that it might be interesting to change the geography again for a third movie, and perhaps take it outside of the borders of the United States. But the companion pieces they’ve put together – Girls State and Boys State – are a compelling snapshot of politics as it stands. Just with different dress codes…
