In Revolving Door, sex and entertainment are linked in an ironic way, for example, in the opening song, which brings to mind the sound of a merry-go-round, and in the roller coaster that appears along the story. Why is that so? And why have you chosen animation? Ever since the early 20th century, the coastal suburb of St. Kilda is known for the beachfront movie theaters, clubs, and parks. One of St. Kilda’s icons is the Luna amusement park, which houses the roller coaster that we showed. During World War II, the neighborhood was a very popular destination for American and Australian soldiers seeking rest and fun. Areas for sex workers flourished as soldiers started being taken to “have fun” in the park’s vicinities. St. Kilda has remained as Melbourne’s “red-light district” ever since; clients are now taken to the parking lot and Luna Park’s adjoining streets. One of the reasons why we decided to use animation was we wanted to ensure some anonymity to participants in the project without resorting to cliché techniques such as showing outlines only, grainy faces, etc. Prostitution in its multiple aspects is very present throughout your work. Why? Alex – I started working in the sex industry at age sixteen. Revolving Door is basically the story of my life in the streets of St. Kilda. Everyone’s life is full of complexities… I arrived in Australia when I was fourteen years old and was unlucky enough to remain under the custody of the State, locked in a juvenile detention center. My memories of that period are very hazy; in essence, I had no family, money, or home, so I went out to work the streets. After a few years going in and out of that life, I managed to get involved in community television projects and started to learn filmmaking. In 1990, I decided to go back on the streets to make a documentary on my experiences, and that was the first time that David and I worked together. Revolving Door was a very difficult work for me to do, because it is a deeply personal trip: Gillian was always my “street name.” In the television series Red Light Girls you approach prostitution in a notable manner, with none of the sordid or obscure tone often seen whenever TV approaches the subject. Has taking part in that project contributed to the work you did on prostitution later on? As a matter of fact, we were the ones who set the tone for Red Light Girls. Alex was sought by [British television company] Granada, initially to do research and write the script for the series’ Australian stories. One of Alex’s passions is to demystify sexual work and show that it is just a job, that it is part of someone’s life, rather than their entire life—there is such a stigma attached to sexual work that we consider it important to break the stereotypes. We wanted to portray the characters as persons, not as prostitutes; to show that sexual work is something they do, not something that defines them. Thus, it took us a long time to find the right people, women who were not victims, so that this would not become a documentary on exploitation. Our approach was so successful and innovative that we were sent to Los Angeles in order to do the same with the series’ North American characters. We would love to do something along the same lines in Brazil. You two have been married for eighteen years. How do your different interests and languages match when the time comes to elaborate a new project? We consider ourselves very fortunate for being able to work and travel together so well! We have our brainstorming sessions and we are very good at creating together. As a matter of fact, we have complementary skills: David, with his formal knowledge from film school, and Alex, with her unique worldview and practical experience. Between the two of us, we can work as a self-sufficient team, with ability to take all aspects of production in stride, from creative to technical. We are an independent team and we both love living with our backpacks on our backs. Gillian’s imprisoning in Revolving Door is a recreation—a moment of fiction—within the documentary. What relations do you establish between documentary, fiction, and animation? The prison scene was a recreation, with the cooperation of the police. It was a recreation of true events—Alex was arrested on several occasions when she worked on the streets—and one that aimed to emphasize the absurdity of a situation that reinforces the “revolving door syndrome”: sex workers are drawn into a vicious cycle of debts, which is worsened through the imposition of fines by the police. One of the reasons for which we made an animated documentary was we wanted to make difficult issues more palatable to the audience. What is more, documentary film has an inherent naïveté, and it may imply the possibility that Gillian herself could have made the drawings, which resemble those of a child. Animation gives you a chance of remodeling reality; you can juxtapose images to create a new reality, one that exaggerates Gillian’s brave perception of the world and, at the same time, retains its true essence. Alexandra, your interest in paper dolls shows through in The Tale of the Right Hand of Spider Lil. How would you two define the project: a fictitious documentary, an experiment on legends, or just entertainment? The main objective of The Tale of the Right Hand of Spider Lil is to let the viewer make his/her own decisions. In the project’s interactive bit, the viewer will have the opportunity to obtain parallel comments by several “specialists,” such as historians, biologists, and forensic psychologists, and of reading digital records, such as lists of transported inmates, journals and newspapers from the 1820s, official mail from the period, etc. There will be enough “evidence” at the disposal of the viewer (who is able to find them) for him/her to be able to make his/her own assessment of whether The Tale of the Right Hand of Spider Lil is a documentary on a fact, or an Australian Gothic urban legend. We like to think about the project as an immersive, nonlinear, interactive, multimedia, nontraditional experience, and one that once again creates possible realities by means of very mixed-up media, in a tactile approach reminiscent of Revolving Door. All of that, coupled with the wealth of historical material on the sordid origins of Australia as a nation that emerged out of a series of British penal colonies, led us into a genre that might be described as “Australian Gothic,” which is pure entertainment with a factual foundation. What other projects are you developing now? Our most recent work—as we proceed with several activities aimed at obtaining funds to produce Spider Lil—has the working title Gunya Girls. It is another documentary combining several languages, this time featuring a prison for young women named Winlayton. It consists of the personal stories of women who were incarcerated there over the course of four decades—including Alex herself. It combines accounts of experiences and archival material, photographs, drawings, and animation. The documentary speaks to us of the huge impact that the experience had upon the few women that lived there and are alive—which is, in itself, somewhat disconcerting. The story of Alex is a quest for lost passages of her childhood, the search for a few good memories to replace the bad memories that she maintains in a very vivid way. Alex struggles to understand who she is and what her place is in the world, and it is by means of the various projects in multiple media, in which we engage ourselves together, that we hope for those answers to be found someday.