Hampton Style - October 10, 2008

I was arrested at age 13 for protesting Apartheid in front of the South African embassy," says award-winning documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, sitting outside her shingle-style house in Shelter Island. The apple has not fallen far from the tree for Rory, who has chosen film making to channel her portion of her family's political legacy.

Moxie Firecracker Films, which she formed with fellow Brown graduate Liz Garbus, has had a string of award-winning films, with Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007) and American Hollow (1999) securing her reputation as one of the country's leading documentary film makers. Her most recent film, Thank You, Mr. President: Helen Thomas at the White House, traces the path of iconic journalist Helen Thomas and her coverage of the oval office. Famous for asking difficult questions, Thomas was both esteemed and feared by many of the nine Commander-in-Chiefs she's seen sworn in. She earned national attention when she broke into the Gridiron Club, journalism's oldest and most prestigious organization, and was the first woman to be elected president of the organization in 1993. Rory beams when speaking of Thomas. "When she started covering the White House, there was a lot more access to presidents. It says a lot about the current presidency and how protected it is," says Rory.

"Democracy doesn't function as well if journalists like Helen don't ask the hard questions, and don't get those answers to the American people. To have an ill-informed public hurts our republic. This was particularly relevant in the lead-up to the war in Iraq, where we saw the journalists not asking the hard questions and a whole range of catastrophic events emerged as a result of that. I think the current election is the most important one of our lifetime," continues Rory. Her public endorsement of Obama sent shivers up the spine of the Clinton camp earlier this year.

While Rory is patently partisan, her films are far from being didactic. She tries to remove herself from the story and allow it to unfold from the point of view of her subject. In that way, notes Rory, documentaries are not like journalism-they have the privilege to be one-sided. When asked if her name affects her interviews, Rory offers: "It does, sometimes, in the beginning-for the first hour or so-and then we kind of get beyond that and start interacting as any two people would in the real world." Finding common ground with her subjects seems to be a gift for Rory. "I'm trying to bring attention to issues that I consider to be neglected in mainstream media. I think that the power of film is really to connect people emotionally to issues and to other people's stories. My approach is to tell our stories, and to try and humanize political issues," she says.

Rory fell into making American Hollow rather by chance. She had been deeply affected by the work her father did with the rural poor in eastern Kentucky, so she naturally gravitated to the area when pursuing her next project, a film originally intended to be about welfare reform as an institution. But the film began to change shape as she became increasingly interested in one family in particular-the Bowlings. In order to penetrate the Bowlings' everyday lives, Rory and husband, Mark Bailey, lived with the Bowlings for a year, collaboratively penning a companion book to the film. Coming from a family as close to American royalty as it gets, Rory's presence is authoritative but reserved. Her father, senator Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated six months before she was born. She lost two of her brothers prematurely; her eldest, Michael, in a tragic, well-publicized skiing accident. Her wedding was postponed after the plane crash that killed her cousin John Kennedy Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessette, and her sister Lauren. With the media working at full pitch, the country watched as what was to be a celebration of Rory's wedding became a family's wake. It was the kind of media coverage her family had seen before, perhaps leading her to turn the camera outward.

Rory initially came to filmmaking with the purpose of enacting social change, and while her interests have broadened over the years, she remains committed to this goal, even occasionally witnessing palpable rewards: "I did a short film about AIDS in 1999, when I felt the global AIDS crisis wasn't getting nearly enough attention. I was able to show it on Capitol Hill and Senator Leahy came up to me after the screening and said, 'You know, I had the opportunity to see your film about a month ago and I want you to know I put an additional $25 million in the budget [for AIDS support in Africa] as a result of watching it.'" While such dramatic impact is not an everyday ocurence, Rory's films do cause her viewers to reflect. Perhaps Sheila Nevins, her boss at HBO, put it best when she called Rory a "gentle revolutionary. There's a fragility to both Rory and to her film. It's made of very gentle stitching."