No whimsical introduction this week, or circuitous personal anecdote. It wouldn’t be right for Valerie Barnhart’s extraordinary charcoal animation, Girl in the Hallway (2019).
The ten-minute film brings to life Jamie DeWolf’s agonising story about the kidnapping of his young neighbour, Xiana Fairchild, and the regrets that followed.
Valerie had never made a film when she embarked on what would become an all-consuming five-year journey. It took an incredible toll on her, and then changed her life completely.
Just a warning that the film, and the interview, deal with some difficult topics around abduction, missing and murdered Indigenous women, and suicidal thoughts.
This is storytelling at its most savagely powerful.
I spoke with Valerie over Zoom from her home in Ottawa. You can read more about her, and the film, on its website.
Why did you want to tell this story?
I'm a big fan of poetry, so I was watching slam poets on YouTube and came across this performance.
I was so taken by the story and the performance – I watched it like three times in a row. Where the story took me visually in my head, I just felt it had to be a movie. And I thought, how hard can this possibly be?
I wasn’t a filmmaker. I was a registered massage therapist. I went to art school, and I was a failed artist, not getting shows, not selling, but I was still making art. My gallery was in my house.
There was a piece of advice I got in art school during my grad panel – when you're tired of your career going nowhere, change mediums. And so I changed mediums.
I had no idea what I was letting myself in for, and I picked the most difficult form of animation possible.
I willed the film into being. I did it with $1,000 – I paid for my software and then I only used things I had lying around the house. I took old newspapers out of the garbage. I only used 20 pieces of paper, and I used a normal tripod.
You had to buy a drawing pack for the core drawing course at art school, and it came with a lot of charcoal. And when I say a lot of charcoal, I animated a 10-minute film in charcoal, and I still have charcoal leftover. I have a lifetime supply.
What was the biggest challenge?
Handling the subject matter. There's trauma in telling stories. I feel like we don't actually talk about the psychological impact this has on the storyteller. It comes at a great cost.
Here I am for five years, hyper-focused on the murder of a child and the larger context of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG).
And I have nothing to comfort myself. Like, this is all real. She was murdered by a serial killer. And I know the particulars of what this serial killer does, and she didn't have a peaceful ending.
So then you have so many feelings of anger and resentment, like where were the parents, and what about the social systems we have in place to protect vulnerable children?
You just have to contend with the stark reality of a horrible situation that you're putting a magnifying glass on. That was really, really damaging. I lost everything, and I risked my life.
There are serious consequences to telling stories like this. Like, why am I doing satire right now? A lot of people want Girl in the Hallway, Part Two. And it's like, no, thank you. This is not sustainable.
Is there anything you would do differently?
Oh, 100%. I would have more support. I would have more boundaries. I would take advice on how to compartmentalise. I would set limits. I was working 18-hour days, which was unnecessary.
What are you most proud of?
That it got a Vimeo Staff Pick. The amount of exposure I got from that, the number of people who have seen the film, I think it’s around 150,000 at my last count.
And that can have a butterfly effect when we're talking about our responsibility to the community at large, and silence, and inaction as a form of violence. It has changed people.
It’s available free on Vimeo, and that means it’s taught in classrooms. The most common letters I get, or people reaching out, are teachers. And hearing about the impact the film has had on students, that never gets old.
I'm so glad that it has got the attention that it's gotten. Indigenous women and girls are more likely to get murdered than any other population demographic across the Americas. This is a systemic problem, and no-one's really talking about it.
In the American media, they didn’t have Xiana’s race as an aspect of this crime. But this serial killer targeted Latina and Indigenous women specifically, because the police don't investigate these cases. They're perfect victims because no-one cares.
And so it's putting that lens on the story, framing it as part of the larger conversation about this ongoing genocide. I think that's really important.
How did this film change you?
Oh, it changed everything.
When I was making it, my mental health got so bad that I ended up on disability. Here I am, this crazy mental patient, living in a low rent area, and people treat you like you're trash.
No-one cared I was making this movie. I didn't really have support outside from my husband and my parents.
I was just making this thing in isolation, hoping people would see it. And then, it launched my career as an animation director. I won so many awards, I got my next film funded. It allowed me to re-enter the workforce, and suddenly I'm respected in society.
And having that reconnection, with the community, and the world at large, had a really stabilising effect on my mental health. Because when I was isolated, it made me want to die. But being able to connect back with the world was so healing.
Every aspect of my life – my career, my finances, my friends, everything transformed.
When the film was coming out, and I was on tour with it, I purposely left out what the actual cost was, because I didn't want to overshadow the issue of MMIW, and that conversation I was trying to have. But now, five years out, I feel like I can talk more frankly about how horrible it was.
Thanks so much to Valerie, and to you for reading. See you in a couple of weeks.