In Conversation with... Catherine Haigh and Hannah Congdon
"We decided to make ours a road-trip with a purpose – with women both behind the wheel and behind the camera"
Catherine Haigh and Hannah Congdon are the directors of documentary Women Behind The Wheel, a gripping film that takes us on a 3000km journey across Central Asia while uncovering women’s stories from across the region.
The road trip itself is a considerable challenge - few women have undertaken it solo - but Cat and Hannah, who also appear in the film, document insightful interviews along the way with such a sensitivity and authenticity that we’re let in on a unique collection of little acts of defiance - of which they refer to as a ‘quiet revolution’.
On the drive, Cat and Hannah meet close to 50 women and generate 200 hours of footage - here they speak to Clare in a follow up to their live Q&A at FilmBath Festival about some of their experiences along the Pamir Highway and their filmmaking process.
Clare - Miss En Scene: What an amazing thing your journey must have been to do, especially together. How long in the making was the road trip? Was it something you had talked about for a while or did you just decide to do it one day?
Catherine Haigh (Cat): We started planning the journey in 2017, having talked about travelling to this part of the world a few years before. We were both curious about the region (Central Asia) because we knew so little about it – it’s not a part of the world that many people visit on holiday, let alone solo females. – The more we researched the more we became fascinated in the history of the region and the impact on women’s rights from imposed Soviet values and traditional national values. We wanted to know more about the women’s stories. When we came across the Pamir Highway (an old highway that crosses Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan), we saw an opportunity to connect some of the stories we’d come across in our research. We decided to make ours a road-trip with a purpose – with women both behind the wheel and behind the camera – on a mission to document local stories.
Clare: Had you been to anywhere like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan before? To me Central Asia seems like a quite uncharted place in terms of media coverage so how was the reality in these countries different to your expectations?
Hannah Congdon: The main thing was the sheer variety of female experiences - I think we felt it would be easier to notice patterns and trends amongst the women’s stories than it was. There was such a diversity, and often extreme contrasts, between the women’s viewpoints. So when we get asked: ‘What do women there think?’ – this is a question that we cannot simply answer without massively generalising.
We definitely went looking for bigger, ‘noisy’ stories that would challenge some of the disempowering narratives we’d read in the press. But in fact it was the smaller, quieter stories that struck us the most; women who were making incremental changes within a very conservative society (bee farming to support themselves, educating policemen about domestic abuse). Something that might not seem radical on the surface is actually very brave when it takes place in that context.
When we put these smaller stories together in the edit, we could finally see that collectively they amount to a quiet feminist revolution.
Clare: Just a brief question about your relationship with the jeep - by the end had you formed an attachment to it, or were you keen to just get rid?
Cat: Hah! By the end... we were like get us outta this car! The Jeep had got SO incredibly dusty and grimy from driving all those roads - I remember we took it to a car wash in Biskhkek (before handing it back) and couldn't believe how different it looked when it came out clean! Waving goodbye to it was a sad moment, we'd definitely formed a bond with it (love-hate relationship maybe?)
Clare: You managed to make a 1 hour 36 min film, but I imagine you had hours if not days of footage you had to cut from your adventure. Can you tell us how you (or your editor) decided what made the cut?
Hannah: This involved so many difficult decisions. We actually interviewed close to 50 women along our journey and had around 200 hours of footage. Our editor (Anna Zavialova) was instrumental in shaping the film, as we felt so close to the stories it was hard to have a non-biased view of them. Anna could also speak Russian, which ended up being a huge benefit – she was able to translate lots of ad hoc interactions so we didn’t need to get transcripts. She waded through a lot of rubbish footage and had an eye for spotting some of the gems in the B roll, as well the main interviews.
Cat: The film follows a pre-defined chronology - our drive along the road - so there’s a limit to how much we could move certain pieces around, for example an interview from Tajikistan couldn’t be placed in any of the other countries. So the geographical borders provided some structure in a sense. In the end we prioritised stories that came from women we felt audiences would really resonate with, and with whom we had brilliant interviews. That meant we had to leave certain issues and perspectives we’d have loved to cover (disability, LGBT rights) on the cutting room floor - we just didn’t feel the interviews we had did justice to such important issues.
When the cut was about 2 hours long we did a test screening – and this was invaluable. We invited other film-makers, women from the region, journalists and friends of ours and got them to complete a questionnaire after the film. Based on the feedback, we completely re-shaped some parts of the film and cut it a lot tighter.
Clare: How did you connect with the people that you met? Were the meet up pre-arranged through contacts or were some ad hoc? And have you been able to maintain these connections?
Cat: It was about 50% planned, 50% organic. Prior to the trip we had done a lot of research online and connected with women mostly via social media – so we had pin pointed certain individuals that we wanted to meet along the way. And for sections where we know we would have a high intensity of interviews, we arranged for local women to travel with us to help translate.
Then there’s the other 50%, and these interviews were completely by change. We might pick up some women who were hitchhiking, get invited to stay with them, and then the next morning they’d point us in direction of a relative or another initiative. In these situations we didn’t have translators, but perhaps we were just lucky – there was normally someone who could assist a bit with translation – although sometimes we only fully figured out what our interviewees were saying when we got the footage translated back in the UK.
Hannah: We have tried to maintain connections with the women we met – this is really important to us! We’ve stayed in touch with a lot of the younger generation on social media, although few of them are still living in Central Asia – most have moved to the US, Canada, Kazakhstan, Germany or Russia. We sent a link to watch the film to all the women whose contact details we have, including many who didn’t end up featuring in the film themselves.
Clare: For anyone - particularly women and girls - wanting to get into documentary filmmaking, what advice would you give them?
Cat: Persistence is key. Overall the film took us over 4 years to make, the post-production was slowed down because we kept running out of money! Honestly, finding the funds for this film was THE hardest part. But we persisted, tried unique avenues, ran two crowd-funding campaigns and through this we were just about able to get it over the line.
Our second bit of advice would be to surround yourself with passionate people. Our team were nearly all young, female creatives working on their first feature film (like us!). Their love for the women’s stories and commitment to quality meant they were willing to go the extra mile – and this transformed the film.
Clare: Finally, what’s next for you? Are there any future projects planned you can share?
Cat: We’ve always aimed to do the most we can with this film before turning our attention to the next. So for now, there is nothing in the works. If you would like the watch the film online, please keep checking our website, as we will be launching the film on Vimeo on Demand in the UK soon.
Dartmouth Films released Women Behind The Wheel in cinemas earlier this year in March (just in time for International Women’s Day), but if you didn’t manage to catch it then, the website to check is catandhan.wixsite.com/womenbehindthewheel as well as their Instagram page, @women.behind.the.wheel.