Stranger Than Fiction: Nina, can you talk about the most difficult thing in telling the story so many years later, and curating this wonderful group of people and photographs?

Nina Rosenblum: The project was so difficult because we wanted to do it so well. As two daughters of a Photo League member, the hardest thing was trying to be as true as we could to the motivations and story of the League. I think I felt like it was my lucky day that we could be the documentary team to make the film about the people who started documentary.

STF: Daniel, in writing the script, what were the challenges in telling this expansive story with so many characters?

Daniel Allentuck: It often felt like there was 50 other people in the room, saying I was a photographer for 50 or 60 years. You’re only using two of my pictures, what’s the matter with you? It was a balance. They kept us honest. It was quite a juggling act keeping them all happy.

STF: Mary, your parents Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin were so critical to this era. As someone who is the gatekeeper of their legacy, what’s it like to keep that period alive for contemporary generations.

Mary Engel: It’s an incredible honor and a legacy, and that’s what I do everyday. I made it a career, and I’m incredibly privileged to do it. My mother died fairly young, at the age of 63, so to be able to have her work so well known 26 years later is incredible. The same thing for my father, it’s thrilling. And the Photo League was such an important thing, as you’ve seen from the screen. We grew up with it, and it’s like part of our family.

Audience: Was the 1999 reunion when you started to work on the film?

Rosenblum: Yes. Danny, Mary and I got support from Howard Greenberg. And we said this is the time to do it, to make sure we would have as many people as we could. And we were very lucky to be able to put it together then. We wanted to make sure to record as many of the people as we could, and we were glad we did at that time. Even though it took so many years to really finish it, we had that basic material, thank goodness.

Engel: George Gilbert, who you see in the film, had a sort of Photo League reunion going. But it started and stopped. But just to locate everybody and get them all together was a huge feat. It was so exciting when it all came to be.

Audience: Could you say a little more about the impact of the blacklist on the Photo League?

Allentuck: Well, for a photographer, it was devastating because many of these photographers were photojournalists and needed their passports to travel. Being associated with an organization accused of being communist was enough to end their careers. That’s one of the reasons that the photographers that we interviewed talked about a gradual falling away of members who, for one reason or another, couldn’t keep their careers viable after a certain point.

Rosenblum: And another thing is that photojournalism was coming in, so there were other avenues where people could work. Times were really changing. So I think it was a combination of those forces that led the Photo League to change at that time. People left, but they also had the ability to get work in the magazine marketplace.

STF: Nina, for people who are excited about this film and want to tell their friends, what are the future opportunities for people to see this film or order DVDs?

Rosenblum: Well, along with other screenings like this that we have planned, including a film festival in Naples, this film will be available very soon on iTunes. So this will be downloadable for rent or purchase within the next few weeks.

Engel: And also the show is traveling. The film will be somewhat of a component, and will be shown sometimes in conjunction with the exhibit.

Audience: Do you feel that photography today is representative of America today in the same way?

Rosenblum: Some is and some isn’t. It depends on the photographer. The Photo League was very true to that. I think it varies today, there are so many different perspectives and people photographing. There are some people that are following in the footsteps of the Photo League with their finger right on that pulse. And I think the Photo League informed so much of what happened, not just in photography, but in film.

Audience: I was so struck by the parallels between that time and this.

STF: As you were working on this, were you thinking about parallels between the time of this film and contemporary time?

Rosenblum: I think we absolutely were hit right in the face with that. As we were developing the film, we really saw that parallel, we were living that parallel. And we thought, okay, this is something the Photo League members did. They made us really understand what was happening in our own time. And what a gift that is, to be able to be given the tools to see more deeply so you can take action in your own time. That’s, I think, what the Photo League left for the next generation.

Audience: What became of Weegee?

Engel: Go to the International Center of Photography. There’s a big show up, I think until September. It’s an incredible story. He was a unique individual and I think everybody’s fascinated by that kind of life.

Audience: What has been it been like to juxtapose the film with the gallery showings at the Jewish Museum?

Engel: It’s incredible. We’ve been working on the film for so long. And their exhibit was approved in 2001. It takes a long time to do a movie, it takes a long time to do a show. And to have it up for five months, you don’t usually get a show for five months. And the press and response has been terrific. I think it’s just a great marriage of the arts to be able to look at the show, and then also learn about it through the film. It’s exactly what we wanted.

Rosenblum: It’s a legacy that also came through my mom, Naomi Rosenblum, who curated shows of the Photo League in Europe. This was a real team effort, and she kept us honest. She really made sure things were checked and rechecked. And a long list of exhibitions started in 2000 in Spain and Italy started to put the legacy of the Photo League on the map, and then it just grew and grew. We feel very fortunate that the timing just came out right. This was a great collaborative affair.

[Q&A has been edited for length and clarity]

Ford was a commander in the US naval reserve and an Academy Award winning filmmaker who directed the special coverage unit under the auspices of the OSS or Office of Strategic Services. Ford’s unit produced one of the first pieces of WW II American documentary, THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY, which won the first Academy Award given for best documentary in 1942. While traveling in a naval convoy in the pacific, Ford captured the ferocity of one of the initial clashes in the pacific theater on a hand-held camera, and was injured by shrapnel during filming.

20th Century Fox studio chief Daryl Zanuck offered Ford the use studios in the evenings so Ford’s team could continue the work of processing, editing and scoring the footage that was being flown back from the front lines via London. Ford was joined by CITIZEN KANE cinematographer Greg Tolland and other industry veterans to produce newsreels shown to U.S. audiences in theaters. The trio of Stevens, Ford and Fuller worked in different theaters of operations during the war, with Stevens and Ford coming together to document the European offensive that began with D-Day in 1944. Fuller also participated in D-Day, but as an infantryman arriving in the third wave of the landings.

At the time, Stevens was an established director who headed the Army signal corps’ Special Coverage Unit. Stevens’ unit, known as “The Hollywood Irregulars” received its orders directly from general Eisenhower. Not assigned any official role to document the war, Sam Fuller was a screenwriter who joined up with the first infantry division and shot the liberation of the Falkenau concentration camp on a camera his mother sent him.

Citing the need to source the original material before it had been edited into “small pieces,” Delage has assembled a panorama of images and scenes from the battlefield unlike anything seen previously. For all the prominent names and production facilities involved in the coverage of the European and Pacific theaters, the most emotionally powerful scenes are some of those captured on Fuller’s silent hand held camera he carried loaded with him at all times. The audience is brought into connection with the prisoners as Fuller enters Falkenau, his camera held at eye level. Delage describes the footage and technique of Fuller capturing a shot of a lone soldier, “He was not prepared at all before, but what defines a filmmaker is knowing what is at stake, finding a good distance, and being a filmmaker is what Fuller wanted to be”.

Delivering the first footage of a concentration camp with his footage of the Nordhausen camp, Stevens’ unit captured such moments as a Lieutenant from Philadelphia delivering the first Jewish service held at Dachau, the still-filled railcars with emaciated bodies piled on top of each other destined for cremation, abandoned as their captors fled. Stevens’ lone sound unit captured the first official U.S. Army interviews of the prisoners at Dachau as the camp was being secured by allied forces. Ford would use Stevens’s footage to compile the documents presented to the court at the first Nuremberg trials that began on November 20, 1945. Footage of the local townspeople carrying and dressing the dead from Dachau and other camps to prepare them for a dignified burial is a striking example of what Delage refers to as “the right filming distance.” Delage described the importance of portraying how Ford, Fuller and Stevens did not allow themselves to be swayed by the ghastly events unfolding before their eyes: “The ethical point of view, the right point of view should be the same, whether you are filming Mount St. Michel or a concentration camp. You don’t have to adapt your ethical point of view depending on what you are filming, this must be a permanent spirit.”

Because of their positions within the OSS and SPECOU , Stevens and Ford were on hand to screen the footage captured by Stevens of the Dachau camp at Nuremberg. Because Fuller was an infantry soldier, he could not attend the trials but he would go on to recreate them in his 1959 film VERBOTEN!.

Conscious of the fact that the image can sometimes be seen as the weakest evidence in a trial, the orders handed down to the film units were successful in their goal of establishing an irrefutable body of evidence against the perpetrators. Delage noted the historic role of the documentary film evidence at Nuremberg. “After World War I, the trials used the term atrocities to describe the events, but after the screening of the films at the Nuremberg trial, another term begins to be used and that word is genocide,” he said.

.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) is a film maker and musician living in Brooklyn.
Follow him on twitter @VanMeterDr

Also this past week, Cambodian journalist Thet Sambath, the director of Khmer Rouge investigative doc ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE, told the Guardian newspaper that he feared for his life, and had been harassed by state security forces for the last two years. The Guardian reported that “Sambath, a senior reporter for the Phnom Penh Post, said the harassment started in May 2010 after news reports circulated internationally about ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE.” In the film, Sambath was able to get Khmer Rouge second-in-command Nuon Chea to talk on camera for the first time about his role in the killings that happened during the military junta’s rule.

Outgoing International Documentary Association President Eddie Schmidt stopped to rap with Katharine Relth to mark his three-year run in the position. His advice for incoming president Marjan Safinia? “Maintain patience. Non-profit organizations can make great strides, but it really doesn’t happen overnight.” (Sounds like good advice for filmmakers too.)

Over at Sundance, Jeffrey Winter took a look at the way buzz had been built up online around Alison Klayman doc AI WEWEI: NEVER SORRY. Winter noted that the film had benefited from being a popular topic among Twitter adherents, among other things.

Back at the New York Times, critic Dennis Lim took a look at the Flaherty NYC program The Lives of Animals. Lim noted that footage of animals featured prominently in some of the earliest films, including famous works by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, and wondered if “animals were encoded in the DNA of the cinema.”

Robert Redford did his part this week to hasten the death of newspapers, telling the BBC that documentaries had replaced broadsheets as the main source of investigative journalism. “You can show things in documentary films that maybe a government or some big corporation might hide,” Redford told the Beeb.

Christopher Campbell at the Documentary Channel has this week’s theatrical releases, which include BULLY, of course. But also in theaters this week is Jon Shenk’s THE ISLAND PRESIDENT. Campbell talked with Shenk about how the director found the story, and his past as a documentarian at Lucasfilm.

We’re still on the hunt for the best documentary-related Twitter accounts to follow, so if you have suggestions please send them to @GuerrillaFace, or e-mail them .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Stranger Than Fiction is taking the week off, but we’ll be back to kick off the Spring Season on Tuesday, April 10 with a screening of WE’RE NOT BROKE, a film by Karin Hayes and Victoria Brookes. The doc, a Sundance alum, takes a look at the ways that multibillion-dollar corporations avoid paying their U.S. income taxes. You can find out more information and buy tickets here. Also, consider picking up a Spring Season Pass, which will grant you access to all of the season’s screenings, as well as free popcorn.

As always, please send your tips and suggestions for Monday Memo posts .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Have a great week everyone!

In somewhat related news, “POV” announced the schedule for its 25th season, set to begin June 21. Among those films included in the new season are Jennifer Fox’s MY REINCARNATION, Ian Cheney’s THE CITY DARK, and Patricio Guzman’s NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT. In an interview with Realscreen, POV Executive Director Simon Kilmurry said the season featured “real stylistic diversity.”

Cable news channel CNN on March 22 said it had laid off dozens of employees from its two documentary units. “We are transitioning to an acquisition model for documentary production, in addition to continuing to produce some original long-form programming, such as CNN’s In America series,” CNN said in a statement. The channel added that much of its documentary programming would now come from outside production companies.

At the What (Not) to Doc blog, Basil Tsiokos gave us an overview of the docs screening at the upcoming New Directors/New Films series, which started on Wednesday and will run until April 1. Tsiokos does us the favor of picking out a few movies he describes as representing “some of the strongest, most provocative non-fiction work of the past few months.”

The Center for Social Media at American University published its Documentary Filmmakers’ guide to fair use best practices way back in 2005, but the information is still relevant today. You can download the guide for free here. The center’s Patricia Aufderheide last week also posted a recap of her experiences at transmedia and cross-platform panels at South by Southwest.

MIT last week launched its own Open Documentary Lab, an effort to bring filmmakers, academics and technologists together to develop new forms of non-fiction storytelling. The lab kicked off on March 20 with a day-long summit, The New Arts of Documentary. Following the summit, Andrew Phelps of the Nieman lab sat down to have a talk with Open Documentary Lab staffers Sarah Wolozin and William Uricchio.

Christopher Campbell at the Documentary Channel Blog has this week’s theatrical releases, which include Jon Shenk’s THE ISLAND PRESIDENT, opening at Film Forum on March 28, and Douglas Tirola’s ALL IN: THE POKER MOVIE. Also being released on Friday, March 30 at Cinema Village is Blue Hadaegh and Grover Babcock’s SCENES OF A CRIME.

We’re still on the hunt for your suggestions for the best documentary Twitter accounts to follow. Got suggestions? Tweet them @GuerrillaFace or e-mail them .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

This week, Stranger Than Fiction is hosting a special Spring pre-season screening of ORDINARY MIRACLES: THE PHOTO LEAGUE’S NEW YORK on Thursday, March 29 at the IFC Center. The film tells the story of The Photo League, which was born out of the hopeful political ferment of the thirties and expired fifteen years later, a victim of Truman-era loyalty purges and the McCarren Act. For more info or to buy tickets, go here.

As always, please send your tips and suggestions for the Monday Memo .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Have a great week everybody!

Simon Kilmurry: I’ve seen this film a number of times, but this is the first time I’ve seen this film on the big screen, and it’s incredibly powerful. It’s an emotional watch, just spending time with Nadya. How did you find the story? How did you find Ashley and end up in Siberia filming this young girl?

Ashley Sabin: In 2007 we were approached by Ashley to make this film. She had seen two of our films previously in different venues in New York. She posed it as a film about modeling and prostitution, or the foggy line that exists between the two. For us, we’re not investigative journalists. We’re not there to dig up dirt or to tell that sort of investigative story. So it was really important for us to find a story that would be compelling enough to carry a film. We started, actually, in China, because Ashley is a designer as well. So she brought us to this factory in China. We thought it would be this whole global commodity chain, and that wasn’t really the case. Then we found ourselves in Russia, and that’s where we first came across Nadya. She had scouted Nadya and that’s what brought us to the story. We felt really strongly that the two parallel stories would complement and contrast each other really well.

Kilmurry: It’s an ethically and morally challenging film. There are lots of moments where you see this young girl reaching out for help or needing help. Where you see your main character Ashley say things which you, as an audience member, sometimes want to question or challenge. I want to ask about your role as filmmakers in both inserting yourself into the film, and holding back. And how you made those decisions.

David Redmon: The movie is structured and unfolds in a way where the filmmaker doesn’t seem like we’re very involved in what’s happening. We’re just sort of there observing what’s happening. But we could have easily made another film about our involvement in the story. I saw a movie this weekend at South by Southwest called SEEKING ASIAN FEMALE where the filmmaker puts herself in the story, and it works quite well. The way we edited the story is the way we experienced it, the way Nadya experienced it and the way Ashley experienced it. We’re trying to portray it that way so you, as an audience, will also experience it that way and ask these questions. What’s going on here? Something’s kind of off. Should I intervene? Why is she here? Why are we there? We’re hoping that the audience will ask these kinds of questions and walk away wondering what they would have done. But also, understand the bigger picture as well.

Kilmurry: Were those conscious decisions made when you were in the moment?

Redmon: In the moment, we didn’t really know what was going to happen. You’re pushed away, but you work on a film for four years, so you don’t really go away. So you push back. And you just step into the middle of a situation with a camera and record it as delicately as possible. But you also have to have persistence. So if Nadya is going to be in trouble, there’s no way we’re going to film that. We’re going to intervene and provide assistance, but we’re not going to put that in the movie. In those situations we’re conscious in the moment, but also conscious when we’re done shooting. And we did follow-ups. We hired somebody to go to Russia. We went to Russia three times as well, to meet with her family and Nadya. We hired someone to go there and find out more about what was going on, to find out why she went back to Japan, to find out how she got there. Then they sent her to China, then to Taiwan, and back to China. It was just too much to keep up with, and was becoming too expensive to follow.

Kilmurry: Rachel, you’re still involved in the business. Can you talk a little about your experience—both working in Japan and the business more broadly. And is Nadya’s a common story that you’ve seen in the business?

Rachel Blais: It’s kind of hard, because every girl has a different story. But there are many elements that happened to Nadya—just going away from home and the depression she goes through, certain things that she doesn’t understand and people not explaining it to her, financially being told one thing and experiencing another—that is common for all models. Not all girls start traveling internationally at 13, but most girls start getting scouted at the age of 13-14, which is a bit weird thinking about the fact that these girls are being scouted to become women models. What are we projecting as being the image of a perfect woman in our society. Why does the story affect us, and why is it in our daily life? As a model, I’ve traveled almost 10 years now, internationally. I’ve lived in Japan for about a year all together. I was in Japan when Nadya was in Japan, and met her when I was going to casting. But Nadya is one girl that was there in 2009, but I’ve met many girls before and after that were 12, 13, 14 year old girls in Japan. But there are 12, 13, 14 year old girls in the U.S. and Europe. Yes, there are girls that keep modeling at 18, 20 and are in magazines, but I’m a very old model at 26 years old. So it’s a bit wrong, I feel.

Kilmurry: There’s a couple of moments in this film where there are kind of shocking clauses that are exposed in the contract. At one point Nadya is 13, and then suddenly she’s 15? This is something that you work on at the Model Alliance. Can you talk about your work and how it relates to working with younger models?

Sara Ziff: First, I’d like to thank Ashley and David for inviting us here. We think this is a really important film. Most people, they see the glamour of the fashion and modeling industries, but they often don’t have any first-hand experience of it. And they don’t see the day-to-day realities that can be less than glamorous. I’ve worked as a model since I was 14 years old. I’m almost 30 now, so I’ve been in the industry for a long time. I made a film about my experiences called PICTURE ME that came out a year and a half ago. In working as a model and making that film and identifying common areas of concern when speaking with other models who’ve had difficult experiences, I realized that I needed to do something. Essentially the modeling industry is unregulated. Models are one of the only groups of performers that don’t have a union. You look at actors, or musicians or dancers, and they all have strong unions protecting them. Models don’t have anything like that. And on top of that, models are independent contractors, so in the U.S., the laws in terms of workplace standards essentially don’t exist for us. There’s no minimum wage, sexual harassment law does not apply. And, of course, you’re dealing with a labor force of children. So you’re dealing with a very vulnerable demographic. The Model Alliance just launched last month, and we’re working to give models a voice in the American fashion industry. We’re still very new, but so far we’ve gotten a lot of support, not only from models but from agencies and designers, photographers—different stakeholders in the business. Certainly, the extreme youth of many of these girls is a problem. I think one of the most disturbing scenes in the film for me was seeing a video reel of Nadya posing very seductively. This is a 13 year old child, and I think a lot of people, when they look at images of models, they don’t stop to consider how old these kids are, and how vulnerable they are. Our first initiative was to set up model support. We’re working with two unions, AGMA, the American Guild of Musical Artists, and Actors Equity. And we’re basically establishing a confidential agreement service for our members, models who’ve experienced sexual harassment or any kind of abuse.

Kilmurry: Rachel, at one point in the film you said something to the effect of the fact that the agent doesn’t take responsibility, the client doesn’t take responsibility. Where does responsibility lie ultimately?

Blais: No one is responsible so if no one is responsible I would think that everyone is responsible, in a way, of accepting the way things are or not speaking about it. But people are not aware, that’s why I feel GIRL MODEL is really important. After doing a lot of Q&As I’m just realizing how people were not aware. So it’s hard to blame people. And even people in the industry seem disconnected to the fact that having underage girls, they don’t understand what it implies to have all of these kids around. In a way, everyone is to blame, but not everyone is aware, so it’s kind of a fine line. I believe that if all agencies said, we’re not going to take any girls under 18 to do women’s modeling, and companies just go to children’s and teenage agencies that are already well-regulated, that would be good. I’ve been told by an agent that that will never happen, the clients won’t respect it and the agency won’t respect it. So the way to go is through the governments, internationally. I’m on the board of [actors’ union] Equity in the UK, so they opened our doors to us. We’re starting in the UK and will hopefully move to the U.S. and work with the Model Alliance. It will be a while, but I think GIRL MODEL is doing an amazing job of creating that awareness that’s needed for people to try to do something about it.

Kilmurry: Jenna, is there anything you would say to follow up on that?

Jenna Sauers: Honestly, the question of responsibility is a really tricky one in fashion, especially because the modeling industry has traditionally played its cards very close to its chest purposefully so that consumers don’t know where these girls come from, where the images come from , how old they are, whether they’re in school. That messes with the glamour of it all, it doesn’t make you want to buy the perfume if you’re suddenly worried that the girl is 15, or 13 as the case may be. That being said, I personally question the wisdom of consumer-directed fashion campaigns because I feel like decades of consumer pressure and letter-writing and boycotts has been focused on the fashion industry, and all of that hasn’t really changed the prevailing imagery that we see in the magazines and on the billboards. It hasn’t really led to better outcomes for the women who consume that imagery, it hasn’t led to fewer eating disorders or really had any measurable impact at all. I feel like if we tried to put more into empowering models themselves and ensuring that they were healthy, and that they had more of a voice in their work and could be a little bit older when they began their careers, that that would naturally have the effect of changing the kinds of imagery that we see. And perhaps even sharing a broader range of body types.

Audience: I was interested to learn that Ashley contacted you to make the film, and I was wondering what sort of editorial input she might have had.

Sabin: We had complete artistic control of the film. She had brought us the film. Right after we got back from China, before we were going to leave for Russia she sprung a contract on us. In that contract she had wanted artistic control. That’s absolutely, for us, unacceptable. That’s an advertisement, and paid work that you decide to embark on. And something that we’re not interested in. The only control she had was that we were unable to show her saying anything defaming a specific company or agency. But the irony behind that was that she censored herself. She never outs anyone, so we never had an issue with the editing. She did see the film right before we screened at Toronto, and the comments that she gave were that she didn’t want the fact that she works at Elite in the film. Which most people outside the industry may or may not know what Elite is. So that was an easy withdrawal. She felt like the way that Japan was put together was a negative portrayal, and she felt like her experiences were positive. What’s interesting about that comment is that you look at her personal diary footage and that’s completely the opposite of what her experiences were. I felt after we had shown her the film and the way that she responded, it could start at the end and go to the beginning and be the same film, that we accurately portrayed her as someone who is in complete denial and not able to take a hard look at how they’re implicated in an industry as participants.

Audience: I don’t think Ashley is in denial. The most disturbing part of the film for me was her complacency. I wanted to know if the models and former models could identify with that in any way. Are you activists now?

Redmon: Let me say something first. We met Rachel at the tail end of making the movie. And we just met Jenna and Sara just a few weeks ago when we found out about Model Alliance. That’s how we relate to each other.

Blais: I’m still modeling. A lot of the models never dreamt of being models. It just happened to us because we’re tall and beautiful around 14, 15 years old. You have a bunch of random people on the street that stop you and start talking to you an asking if you want to become a model. And you just kind of fall into it, and as you go through it you kind of learn what’s going on. You talk with all of the girls. But some girls, it takes them years to really understand what’s going on. Some girls don’t want to admit what’s going on to themselves. These girls are in models apartments at a very young age. They’re with other girls for whom the entire experience is being normalized. So at any time models are going in and out of the feelings that Ashley is going through herself, knowing that a lot of things are around but not being shared. I think once you know, for me it was to keep going to speak out for girls, to speak with girls at castings and tell them about Equity in the UK. Now to tell them about the Model Alliance in New York, to do that kind of work. Because if you’re still in the industry you can make a change and you can see what’s really going on. Once you start speaking you do work way less. Every time I say to the agencies, I can’t work on these days, it’s quite interesting. Then they start having a bunch of castings. Because the rest of the time I’m sitting at home waiting. And when I say I can’t work these days, without telling them why—I think they’re smart enough to know it’s for GIRL MODEL—I start getting offers for money jobs. So it’s my decision to say no on these jobs because these issues are important to be talked about. So maybe I’m an activist, I don’t know.

Audience: Why did you chose to show Ashley’s surgery? Was that to show another side of her, or to show the industry’s impact healthwise? What was your intention there?

Sabin: For us, there were a few different scenes that were like that, which were the surgery, the baby scene, the cut up imagery she has in her bathroom. She was sharing those scenes with us during the production. And what became quite clear was this relationship to the body, and dissociation with the body at the same time. For us the surgery scene is interesting and has a bigger metaphor because her industry is evaluating bodies, body parts. And this body or matter is growing within her and wanting to come out. I think it was a poetic metaphor that we were really going for.