SOARING WITH HER OWN WINGS Em Baker on Marriage, Movie-making and I Am No Bird
Em Baker is no romantic, and far from the kind of woman who spent her youth waiting for Prince Charming to sweep her off her feet. Marriage, to her, is ‘a stodgy, patriarchal, antiquated institution’, and not one that she, as a queer woman, ever felt particularly drawn to or welcome within. She’s an unlikely candidate, then, to spend four years and a considerable amount of her own savings on travelling around the world to immortalise the wedding days of four women. Yet that’s exactly the journey we sit down to speak about following the world premiere of her debut feature documentary, I Am No Bird, at the 2019 Sydney Film Festival (SFF).
Filming across such diverse locations proved challenging, especially as Baker was self-funding the project while continuing to work full-time … Baker is highly aware of the barriers faced by young filmmakers like her when trying to get projects underway.
So how does a self-described cynical feminist end up making a film about marriage? Baker’s career in filmmaking began when, as a 21-year-old journalism student, she became enamoured of a short film called Glory at Sea (2008). After contacting the film’s director, Benh Zeitlin, and producers, she was invited to move to Louisiana and be trained as a visual-effects artist on Zeitlin’s next project, the eventual multi-Oscar-nominated, Cannes Caméra d’Or–winning Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012). Following that ‘extremely fortunate’ experience, Baker became determined to make her own film. She decided to bicycle across the United States, from San Francisco to Orlando, and film what she could along the way – an
