FilmFestivals.com - Cannes 2000

Girlfight, Karyn Kusama's fiery look at a teenage girl's struggle to become a boxer, shared the grand jury prize for best film in the Sundance Film Festival's dramatic competition and also received the jury's award for best director. Filmed last spring in Brooklyn, New York, for $1m, this unusual coming of age story was snapped up for distribution by Screen Gems "which has all been fantastic," says Kusama. "But initially, if it were up to me, this wouldn't have been my first film. I was really scared through much of the shooting, thinking, am I really going to pull this off?"

A native of St Louis, Missouri, 32-year-old Kusama studied film-making at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Her thesis film, Sleeping Beauties, won a Mobil Award in 1991, but even after that she still couldn't make any headway on a feature project of her own. After spending a few years writing and working, she got a job as director John Sayles' assistant "luck and timing," says Kusama modestly. Of course the cine-master asked his new worker if she had anything that she'd like him to look at. A couple of scripts down the line, she brought "that boxing script" for him to see, and suddenly Sayles was on the mentor track, as friend, advisor and executive producer.

Kusama, who describes herself as "kind of a jock" in high school, says the roots of the story were born out of her own feelings of personal frustration. "I found that, at 24 years old, I was suddenly a pack-and-a-half-a-day smoker, out of shape and feeling like a complete jerk. So I went looking for adventure, to this very famous Brooklyn gym called Gleasons, where I decided to learn to box. It was a very rich, electric place. It was loud, chaotic, people screaming and yelling, telling stories. It was a world of games, spirituality, fun and violence. I loved it. In a way, it was almost this kind of fun... church."

From that experience was born the tale of Diana, a high school scrapper who lives in Brooklyn with her violent, single father and bookish brother. When she stumbles into the boxing world, Diana knows she has finally found her stairway to heaven. Although her father forbids her to box, she nonetheless convinces one of the trainers to take her on. Things get confusing when she finds herself falling in love with one of her sparring mates. Even so, she commits herself to the sweet science, determined to become the gym's first female champion.

Kusama says: "I think for a lot of people there is something very powerful that gets answered when they see two half naked bodies going at it. It's kind of like sex, ah... without the sex. But I'm also really hoping that people respond to the fact that this male character is struggling with images of masculinity all the time, trying to figure out how he can be with a woman who is so aggressive an animus that he in fact doesn't possess. He is so much more of a reasonable person. "But that's a very real situation," she continues. "I know lots of couples where it is woman is the far stronger one. How much of that they reveal to the public, as always, is up to them. And to me that is always an interesting story."

Shari Roman