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Rory Kennedy's Roar - filmmaker - Interview
Interview, Nov, 1999 by Leslie Camhi
Plenty of movies and documentaries have set out to reveal the lives of rural families living on the economic edge - what sets Rory Kennedy's American Hollow apart is that she addresses her subject with so much heart and such a level gaze, without ever slipping into the trap of condescension
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In busy office on the thirteenth floor of a TriBeCa loft building, 164 pounds of canine love came barreling toward me. "That's Clementine," a young woman said, extending her hand. "I'm Rory." Her manner was brisk, but her mild, light eyes seemed oddly familiar. The daughter of Ethel and Robert Kennedy, she was bern six months after her father's assassination in 1968. Today she's a documentary filmmaker and the director of American Hollow, a film focusing on another American family, the Bowlings, who've lived for generations in a remote Kentucky valley called Mudlick Hollow. Seventy-year-old Iree and her tribe work the land, gather roots, and collect welfare, as a world of satellite television and Prozac slowly encroaches. American Hollow airs this month on HBO; the accompanying book (with a foreword by Robert Coles, interviews by Mark Bailey, and photographs by Steve Lehman) is published by Bulfinch Press.
LESLIE CAMHI: in the book, you say this project was partly inspired by a trip your father took to West Virginia. What had you heard about that trip?
RORY KENNEDY: When my father went down to Appalachia, it had a very resonating impact on him. He saw children who were malnourished, and families of ten living in one-room shacks. My mother and brothers and sisters often talked about how important it was to him. So it was an area that I had always heard about and been interested in.
LC: The images I have of Appalachia date from the '30s, from James Agee and Walker Evans. It's not a place I think about as existing today.
RK: In some ways, it hasn't changed that much, though in other ways it has. A lot of people say the social programs of the '60s were a complete failure, but in truth people live better than they did thirty years ago. There's more education and more support for people in abusive relationships. A lot of people who left the region have come back, so there's a broader range of influence and experience. More people have running water, telephones, bathrooms. You still come across pockets of extreme poverty. But to me, this film is really a celebration. Iree Bowling, in particular, has such a stirring spirit, a great sense of humor, and pride in the land and her family. I was completely amazed by her.
LC: Did you meet her first?
RK: Yes, but a number of the kids were hanging around, so I met a whole bunch of them.
LC: You describe the Bowlings as a matriarchy. But many of the women have suffered from extreme domestic violence.
RK: So many of the women in the family have emerged from difficult situations. However small their achievements might appear in a broader context, they've done really extraordinary things with their lives. Whether it's Samantha, who's managed to step out of an abusive relationship. Or Iree, who grew up watching her mother being constantly abused by her father, in a family where there was alcoholism, and still became this incredibly strong person. Or Wanda, who's taken it upon herself to get her high school equivalency diploma. And now she and Samantha are working at Mid South Electronics. They play such an important role in keeping their family together and rearing their children and growing fresh vegetables in their garden. And I think there's a sense that the Bowlings wouldn't live in the Hollow as they do now if it weren't for Iree. She's the reason they continue to operate as a family in the way they do and to have the work ethic that they do, despite the fact that a lot of them don't have what we would consider real jobs.
LC: What is their work ethic, anyway?
RK: In Appalachia, there are very few job opportunities. A lot of people are faced with the decision of whether to stay with their families or to go to a city where they've never been and take on a different life. And that's really hard. I hope one of the questions the film raises is about the demand in our society to be as productive as possible in an economic sense. What you see are the consequences of that demand, the dying of a particular culture. Some people might say that it should die. But to me, there's something very important there that I don't want to lose hold of, which is their sense of family and community and working the land. And their dependence upon one another, in a nice way. To force these people out has real material consequences that we might not be able to gauge in the size of our gross national product, but that can be measured and felt in other important ways. Ultimately, though, I think the film asks more questions than it answers.
LC: You've been making documentaries for eight years. I get the impression that American Hollow is less pointedly political than some of your other work.
RK: Yes. I just came back from Washington, where we had a screening on Capitol Hill of a film I finished a couple of months ago, about AIDS in Africa. And there's a real sense that it's helping to influence a bill allocating millions of dollars for children with AIDS there. It's a fifteen-minute, educational advocacy film that hits its point home over and over again. But the kind of filmmaking that American Hollow represents is also incredibly important to me.
