In a heartwarming tale about the power of friendship, Josephine Anderson’s film Curl Power (part of the St. John’s International Women’s Film Festival [SJIWFF]) is an intimate look at a British Columbia teenage girls curling team, the 4KGIRL$, who dream of becoming Canadian National Curling Champions. From the pressure of high school graduation and body image, to depression and teenage angst, Anderson’s film is a delightful, insightful and honest look at the complexity of teenage girlhood, with a competitive edge.
While curling is one of Canada’s most popular sports, but also a curious sport for many who are less familiar, it’s a particularly interesting backdrop for this coming-of-age story. This team of girls is coached by three olympians, who are also their mothers, amplifying their desire to be national champions.
But in order to make this documentary and share the story of the 4KGIRL$, Anderson had to get approval from all the parents.
“I was really nervous because I knew that I wanted to ask them to follow their teens for many years, and I think that’s a huge thing to ask of anyone,” Anderson told Yahoo Canada during the 2024 Hot Docs Festival in Toronto. “You don’t even know me. So how can you trust me?”
“But I just laid it out on the table all at once and let them know exactly what I wanted to do. Let them know I wanted to film on the ice and off the ice, I wanted to follow them for years on end until they graduated from high school. I think maybe because of that they were willing to take the ride. They knew I was being straight up with them, and luckily everybody agreed on the spot.”
‘It’s a huge gift and I don’t take it for granted’
There’s something particularly compelling about how the girls in Curl Power, Hannah, Brooklyn “Brook,” Savannah “Sav,” Ashley and Amy, are all so honest, including being incredibly candid about body image, taking antidepressants and coping with a parent who faced a cancer diagnosis. It’s certainly a testament to the amount of trust Anderson built with them.
“I would phone them every couple of weeks and have these really long conversations with them, maybe an hour or two hours, and I would ask them about every part of their life, basically just a big catch up session,” the filmmaker explained. “And it would take a long time, because there are five girls, plus three coaches, so it took me days to talk to everybody, and then I did that all the time for years.”
“So in the first few months we were just talking so often that we felt familiar, we felt comfortable. Of course, there’s also the camera, and so it took a few filming sessions for them to feel fully at ease. … I feel really grateful for the trust that they were willing to give me, to be honest. It’s a huge gift and I don’t take it for granted.”
Anderson also captures a significant shift in the friend group, when Amy graduates before the rest of the team.
“I think that early on the girls really didn’t want to talk about Amy graduating because they were so heartbroken, like even a year before it happened, and just never wanted to be separated from one another,” Anderson said. “But of course, that’s life, right.”
“Being the first one to kind of delve into her future life, it was really special, and I think really interesting to have that dynamic where you can see some of the other girls still having time left before they make some big choices in their lives. … But having Amy do it first, I think it was a little bit of a mirror for them to reflect back on themselves.”
‘I felt kind of lonely’
When it comes to the core message of Curl Power, for Anderson the film is really about the power of friendship and connection.
“If I can be honest, the pandemic hit, everyone’s kind of isolated, I felt kind of lonely and I didn’t have a lot of opportunities to spend time with people,” Anderson shared. “But then the film was a really good excuse. You’re like, ‘Well, I have to keep filming, so we’re just going to keep going.'”
“We’d have these really awesome shoots where I got to witness them leaning on each other, … being vulnerable with each other, just being buddies. Honestly, it filled me up. It made me so happy to get to be a part of that. It’s such a simple thing. I think a lot of time when we’re talking about women’s issues, especially young women’s issues, and we talk about friendship and body issues and mental health, a lot of times it gets overlooked or brushed away as like kind of insignificant. But I think the stories really matter. And I think that something as simple as the power of friendship, it sounds so cheesy, but I think we all really need that right now.”