Reviews

The Taos News The SF Examiner | The Pacific Sun

Mother Courage
Yvette Torell Speaks Up for Single Mothers
in Just Mom and Me

BY SURA WOOD

This past October, at the Mill Valley Film Festival, I was sitting in the audience for Chicks and Flicks: Tricks of the Trade, a rather downbeat panel discussion on the obstacles facing women in the film industry. At one point the proceedings turned from gloomy to confrontational. One of the few men in attendance took issue with the negative, defeatist tenor of the event; he then bore the brunt of the moderator’s barely veiled hostility and gratuitous sarcasm. Many of us were frustrated to see what had already been a bleak discussion degenerate into this sophomoric exchange. Finally a woman stood up and in a clear and quietly defiant voice expressed her own sense of determination as a woman filmmaker. "You just have to get out there, do really good work and have faith in yourself," she said, "and there will be people who will come out and support you." The audience cheered.

That was my first encounter with Yvette Torell, and I wanted to know more about her. Recently I had a chance to sit down at a North Beach cafe and talk with her about her new documentary, Just Mom and Me. It became clear to me that Torell is a straightforward and resourceful woman with a hard-won optimism tempered by experience. Indeed, it was her first-hand experience as a single mother of a ten year-old son that led her to make Just Mom and Me.

Torell says she realized that there were few representations of single mothers in the media and few role models with whom she could identify. An Avid editor by trade, Torell is no stranger to filmmaking. So in January, 1995, at the age of 34, she began working on a film that reflected the world she knew and that many others share. "Last year there were 13 million single mothers; when I started the film there were 10 million," she says. "No one is looking at this sociologically, asking why there is such a large number of single mothers in our society, and trying to determine if there is some kind of trend emerging."

Just Mom and Me, which she shot on Beta SP and digital video, then transfered to 16mm, interweaves individual portraits of five women whose reasons for becoming single mothers are as diverse as their backgrounds. Isayana, a teenage mom who became pregnant and dropped out of high school, didn’t fully make the connection between having sex and the responsibility and sacrifice involved in having a child. Adi lost her beloved husband to cancer and was left to rear their seven year-old daughter on her own. Diana, a lawyer, broke up with her boyfriend but decided to go ahead and have their baby. Tracy, a can-do mother of three children, who married at 17 and divorced at 20, managed to earn a teaching credential from Mills College. Beth, an unmarried successful career woman, heeded the warning tick of her biological clock and opted for artificial insemination. Torell shows these diverse and articulate women coping (some more successfully than others) with the financially and emotionally daunting task of parenting solo.

Just Mom and Me is a film with a clear message. "The goal is to wake us up to how hard it is to raise a child," says Torell, who has been a single mother longer than any of the women portrayed in the film. "I would rather not see people having children unless they’re really prepared. I wanted to give examples of women who are real and strong and who will do their own thing despite the constraints of society; but what I ended up focusing on were the children. I realized that they are who we really have to think about."

Torell doesn’t harbor illusions about fundamentally changing society, but she does hope to impart some wisdom and encourage people to think twice before making a commitment that she characterizes as "more serious than marriage." She recalls Dan Quayle’s grandstanding political stunt of railing against the TV character Murphy Brown, after Murphy decided to have a child on her own. While the show raised the hackles of the religious right, it evoked a decidedly different reaction in Torell. She says she was moved watching Murphy, the notoriously independent careerist, give birth with only her friends by her side and a male partner notably absent. "It brought up a lot of emotions. We were raised to think that there would be a man there." When she started Just Mom and Me, Torrell says, there was a stigma attached to the term single mother. So she set out to dispel the myths.

Torell has been preoccupied with the concerns of women over the course of her career. Her first short film, Persephone’s Dream (1987), shot on Super-8, is a ten-minute visual poem about a young woman’s transformation. In 1988, Torrell traveled on her own to China. Four months pregnant and carrying two Super-8 cameras in her backpack, she shot Y Na Na, a documentary portraying the women of four indigenous groups living in southwest China and Tibet. Torell also served as co-producer and editor of William Stafford and Robert Bly: A Literary Friendship (1994), a film about the two noted poets.

It was her previous film experience that enabled Torell to secure $3,500 in initial funding for Just Mom and Me from the Pacific Pioneer Fund, a grant given to a filmmaker only once in her career. Though she eventually raised about $40,000 (approximately $15,000 of which came from her own pocket), attracting money for Just Mom and Me was an inordinate struggle. She learned that the Ms. Foundation, the Barbra Streisand Foundation and the National Organization for Women do not fund films. ITVS passed on the project, and FAF grants panels turned her down four times. (FAF did act as fiscal sponsor for the project.)"I was in shock," says Torell. "I think this is the most important issue in our country right now, and the reason I did this film is that it needed to be done. What I came to realize is that the people who make the decisions regarding funding are filmmakers and artists who may not have children and perhaps don’t understand. No one has done this film before because single mothers are too busy and nobody else cares."

In 1996, when she was broke and feeling discouraged, Torrell had a fortuitous reunion with Adrianna Pope, a former classmate from Santa Catalina High School in Monterey. Pope, a graduate of USC film school and a producer of short films and television specials, is well connected with the affluent Pacific Heights community of San Francisco. Torell showed her a clip from the film, and Pope liked what she saw. "I wanted to be involved with the project because I thought it was a story that needed to be told," says Pope. "Though I’m not a single mom, I identified with it. I thought it could have been my story."

Pope turned out to be an excellent ally. She agreed to executive-produce the film and donated her time as well as the $10,000 cost of the answer print. Pope was instrumental in arranging private meetings with foundations and private funding groups. She also engineered a pivotal introduction to Peter Poulos and Alix Sabin of the SPL Group. SPL raises money for nonprofits and had worked with Debra Chasnoff and Helen Cohen on It’s Elementary. "They were angels," says Torell. "They can raise as much as $150,000 in one night."
Torell, Pope, Poulos and Sabin brainstormed on funding strategies and sent out a rash of letters asking for donations. They also coordinated an event at San Francisco’s Planet Hollywood restaurant, enlisting the support of Jeanette Etheredge, a single mother who is on the board of the San Francisco International Film Festival and has some famous friends. Such luminaries as Philip Kaufman, Francis Coppola and Willie Brown appeared at the fundraiser, which pulled in about $9,30O and drew press attention for the film. Pope describes the way the Planet Hollywood event came together as "a Cinderella story that doesn’t happen very often."

The future of Just Mom and Me is uncertain, however, and a fairytale ending is not assured. Though it has been shown at the Taos Talking Pictures Festival and Mill Valley, distributing the film with no money is another story. "I’ve been working on this for three years," says Torell. "It’s really hard for me to continue to work for free." She has gotten a nibble from POV’s executive producer, Lisa Heller, who told Torell that her film was a contender for next summer’s slate. But according to Torell, she is up against a widely held notion that no one is interested in women and children. "My biggest obstacle is the assumption on the part of curators and programmers for TV that this is a topic that is not of interest to the masses. I have to get by the people who assume that people don’t want to know about children or women or families. We shouldn’t underestimate the audience."

In the meantime, Torell is plotting her next move and recovering from the exhaustion associated with being the sole motivating force behind a film. "How many people am I?" she asks rhetorically. "I have to be an Avid editor and know the technology. I have to know story and content and flow and image and color. I have to shoot. I have to know the cameras. I have to produce, fundraise and coordinate." And she’s also a single mother. "I never get a break," Torell says resignedly. "Actually, I’m relieved that we got this far. Now I can be calm."

Sura Wood is the film critic for radio station KPFA in Berkeley.

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The Taos News| Release Print | The Pacific Sun

BY G. Allen Johnson of the Examiner Staff

"THE FAMILY is reformulating itself," Yvette Torell warns. "And nothing realistic on this topic has come out of Hollywood. . . . Why aren't these stories being told?"
Now Torell, a single mother who once felt weird and happy at the same moment while watching TV's Murphy Brown welcome unwed motherhood, is attempting to fill that gap with Just Mom and Me.
The hourlong documentary, which plays with "The Andre Show" (about a boy with AIDS) during the closing weekend of the Mill Valley Festival, is an insightful, moving celebration of six unwed mothers in the Bay Area and how they cope with professional and personal responsibilities.
It plays Sunday at 1 p.m. at the Sequoia I in Mill Valley.
"I think my attitude changed about this situation," said Torell, a freelance editor and filmmaker in San Francisco. "I was trying to be objective. I was thinking I was making a film about heroines - you know, this empowering feminist film."
Instead, she found a wildly divergent half-dozen women who were apt to make mistakes and quite often had difficulties with finances, time management and other relationships. Included is a teen mother from Nicaragua, a 40-something career woman who decides to become artificially inseminated, awidow and a twice-divorced mother of three.
The challenge these women face is to channel the feeling of pain and rejection away from their children. Torell's distinct achievement is not only portraying the mothers' struggles and rewards, but also giving the viewer a sense of the unique personalities of the children involved, and how they handle their home life.
"The most important thing is the children," Torell said. "I always speak to them as if they're just people - and they are just people - they're just smaller. . . . We as a country really need to think about our children. I think too many people have children without really a serious sit-down discussion about (the responsibility)."
Torell dedicated the $30,000 project to her 9-year-old son, Tristan, who provided the illustrations.

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Release Print The SF Examiner | The Pacific Sun

By Susan Mihalic for The Taos News

The topic, "women in film," is as diverse and as different as each of the films, created by women, that will screen at the Taos Talking Picture Festival. Motherhood, adoption, lesbianism, beauty pageants, AIDS--these are a handful of the subjects women address in the films showing around town this week.
The "Motherhood" program in the festival includes the world premier of Just Mom and Me by Yvette Torell; The Andre Show by Beverly Peterson; and The Waiting Children by Joanne Ashe. It also includes some of the finest, most honest film-making to be found anywhere.
Torell follows the stories of five single mothers: A woman whose husband died, a woman who is twice divorced, a woman who became pregnant by her live-in boyfriend, a woman who decides to be artificially inseminated and a teenager who became pregnant at 15. Racially, ethnically, economically and educationally, these women are very different, but their struggles are remarkably similar as they discover the reality of motherhood.
"Having a baby is a lifetime commitment," said 18-year-old Isayana, the mother of a 3-year-old girl. She sounds slightly astonished at the weight of the realization.
Isayana's story is especially powerful and poignant. "Sex was not even all that good for me," she said openly. "It was showing him that I loved him. I wish I hadn't let him have so much power over me." At the same time, she said, "I don't blame him, because ultimately (having sex) was my decision."
Torell herself had a baby at the age of 28. When her child was four or five months old, the father left her. She thought her situation was bad, she said in a recent interview, until she attended a single mother's support group "and heard real horror stories about the fathers and the situations."
"Single mothers are not represented with respect in the media," Torell said. "Children from single-parent families are treated differently." And despite the fact that in the United States 13 million single women are heads of the household, "the term 'single mother' even has a stigma," she said.
With a desire to remedy that and having recently read "In Praise of Single Parents" by Shoshannah Alexander, Torell decided to document the experiences of single mothers whose lives don't fit the stereotypes--at one extreme, TV's "Murphy Brown," and the other, a crack addict.
The result is a polished production that offers a fascinating, realistic look at the difficulties of single motherhood.

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The Taos News | The SF Examiner | Release Print

Celluloid Dreams
Local indie filmmakers get their due at the 21st Mill Valley Film Festival by Mal Karman for the Pacific Sun Dreams--those ephemeral things that form the center of our frantic life trajectories, like the flame to the moth on a hot summer night--are motivational molecules that drive independent filmmaking as well. If you need proof, check out the 21st annual Mill Valley Film Festival.
More independent films are getting made today through the cunning, intuition and outright begging of fledgling directors, because as one filmmaker notes, "There's very little left to trickle down to us." The requisite equipment for making a movie--camera, lights, dolly--has been supplemented by the independent's gonzo toolbox of credit cards and instinct, the fortitude to challenge logic and charge hellbent down the road to debt, riding on hopes for a modern day miracle.
Single motherhood gets a lot of mileage this year. Yvette Torell's first feature length documentary, Just Mom and Me (Sunday Oct. 11, 1pm), is a sometimes wrenching indepth look at five Bay Area mothers and how they came to raise children on their own: a Nicaraguan teenage mother; the Jewish widow of an African-American; an abandoned Asian-American lawyer; a Walnut Creek veteran of artificial insemination; and an Oakland woman who had three kids by two men.
"You could say that the film is a sociological study," says the San Francisco filmmaker, herself a single parent. "It shows you how drastically motherhood has changed over the years. Handling all those multitasks [without the presence of a man], it teaches you to produce. Mothers make good producers." She says the idea for the film came from the realization that "everytime I talked to someone, they were either thinking of doing it [single motherhood], they had done it, or they knew someone who was doing it."
Torell, a freelance editor, says she was "incredibly lucky" to have gotten funding which, typically, came from a multitude of sources, a Pacific Pioneer grant, a $10,000 donation, a one-night fundraiser at Planet Hollywood, a corporate camera package donation and editing facilities from Milt Wallace Video in San Francisco. She hopes the film will end up on the small screen-a modest goal considering her 3-1/2 years of dogged persistance.

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