Film Review: Geek Girls (2017)

Writer and director Gina Hara has created an interesting and very specific subculture exploration.  Documentary Geek Girls looks at women who take ownership of their geekiness and that label.

The film is a series of interviews on a half dozen or so girls speaking about their individual interests and what it means to be a woman within the geek world. There’s a gamut of engrossing women including a NASA engineer, a Victorian era fashion enthusiast, cosplayers and girl gamers. Intersecting these stories is Gina’s autobiographical narrative and voiceover on those same issues growing up and her journey to the mecca of geekdom: Japan.

The conversations and dialogue are stimulating and engaging but we never have a clear idea where the documentary is going. It feels as if the editor was left out of some crucial conversations. The film drifts around the subjects and questions until stumbling into focus and direction when the girls speak to the abuse and barriers they have encountered, specifically online. A good proportion have experienced harassment and bullying on the grounds of their gender. The interviews are staged apart over a good deal of time and space yet all the girls relay similarly vile experiences and coping strategies they have built.Geek Girls poster

It perhaps would have been interesting to hear from the instigators of the abuse, to find out the motivation for such inexcusable behavior. Gina talks of escalations of trolling beyond the internet with real world consequences, in particular an event she references numerously to ‘Gamergate’ that left many girls abused and afraid. Frustratingly though it’s an event the documentary doesn’t attempt to explain or explore beyond cursory opinions. I was left to google what happened out of curiosity.

Gina talks of the numerous subjects who pulled out of filming in fear of retaliation as well as her own worries that her feature could spark a thunderstorm in a tea cup. The girls talk of a fear of being targeted by men angry at them for just existing within a perceived male space. Much the same way Louis Theroux dives into the deep end of bigotry, I would much have rathered an exposé on what motivates the faceless men these girls are so wary of. The documentary instead is a safe space for these women making it fairly unique. The target audience, intended or not, is the subject of the film – the geeky girls themselves.

For a documentary intended to be consumed by the public the assumed prior knowledge is too high. Too often the film glances over subjects and topics that are on the surface intriguing. With the perceived hypothetical backlash towards the film there’s a defensive tone that serves to muddy the lens. There are really interesting women in this feature. But without a purposeful direction, without conflict, without context and with such a discrete, narrow audience, the film just kind of washes over the viewer with a certain ambivalence.  There are three good ideas here: a tribute to girl nerds, a filmmaker’s journey to the heart of geekdom, and an exposé of online female targeted abuse. The director is clearly talented but got lost somewhere trying to discern the forest from the trees.

Screenings of Geek Girls can be requested through demand.film from 8th March

2.5 blergs
2.5 blergs

 

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