REBEL REBEL

Don’t mess with SJ Chiro’s leading ladies

By Zoe Wallace

SJ Chiro has a taste for risky filmmaking. Her first film, a silent-film treatment of Little Red Riding Hood, revised the storyline to include a karate-chopping heroine and took awards at two festivals. Her most recent, Third Day’s Child, is a Philip K. Dick-esque vision of the lives of women and children in an oppressive, reactionary future society.

Chiro adapted the script from a play written by John Kaufman for 14/48, a Seattle theater festival that presents 14 plays written, casted, and performed in 48 intense hours. She says she had never seen the play itself, but a friend recommended the script. She was hesitant at first, but Third Day’s Child stuck with her.

She describes the concept of the film as “Hitchcockian.” “The government has control and uses it in a way that doesn’t serve women,” she says. “Hitchcock was so claustrophobic and so bizarre about women. I wanted to have that vibe in the film.”

The “third day’s child” of the title is a child who is only allowed to experience every third day of her life. Like many other children in her society, the character spends the rest of her life “blank”-her body ages but her mind remains in childhood. The “third day’s child” program is the government’s idea of population control, and to become an “every day” child one must prove oneself to be a productive member of society.

The final scene transforms Third Day’s Child into a film-within-a-film. We realize the whole story has been an rebel propaganda piece broadcast on the hand-held screen of another young girl, a third day’s child like the titular character. “I really liked the turnaround image of the ‘every day’ girl as the leader [of the resistance group],” she says.

The image of a young girl taking in media at the end of the film is important to Chiro, who sees her daughter doing something similar every day. She says she wants her viewers to wonder what the girl will do with the information she has learned. “I think the idea that we are not affected by media is ridiculous,” she says.

“Hitchcock was so claustrophobic and so bizarre about women. I wanted to have that vibe in the film.”

Chiro has an extensive theater background, which she drew on while making Third Day’s Child. “I did have a lot of theater contacts, set designers, actors, but you need maybe five times the people that you need to make a play to make a film,” she says. She held many auditions but ended up working primarily with people she already knew.

“I called in a lot of favors,” she says.

The permanence of film attracts Chiro. “Theater is frustrating because only the people who are there at that moment will remember it, while a film project can have a life beyond that.”

Chiro, a native of Sonoma County in Northern California, has lived in Seattle for 21 years. Her journey to SIFF has not been a direct one. At 29, she was accepted to USC’s film school, but chose not to attend. She experimented with making a film and although she never finished it, she discovered that she loved the process of filmmaking.

After her daughter was born, she took a class called “Personal Documentary” at 911 Media Arts Center and made a film about a power weightlifter. She followed it with another class at Northwest Film Forum with award-winning local filmmaker Lynn Shelton. Her work has been seen at many film festivals, including the 2007 San Francisco Women’s Film Festival, where her film Little Red Riding Hood won Best Live Action Short, and at Cinema K Film Festival 2007, where it won Best Cinematography. She used the success of Little Red Riding Hood to raise funds for Third Day’s Child.

Chiro believes that her sex is tied to her identity as an artist, and she is proud of creating a different viewpoint for women. “I don’t mind using the word feminist,” she says.

SJ Chiro on the set with DP Ben Kasulke

CREW BOX: Third Day’s Child
Writer: John Kaufman
Director & Producer: SJ Chiro
Director of photography: Ben Kasulke
Editor: Michelle Witton