Bananas Girl

Logline: Seven-year-old Bananas Girl asserts her independence, perfects the art of the non-sequitur and navigates the boundaries between herself and her mom.

Synopsis: Seven-year-old Bananas Girl asserts her independence, perfects the art of the non-sequitur and navigates the boundaries between herself and her mom. The film exists in the intersection of home movies, performance art and documentary, incorporating a mother’s and daughter’s obsessions and their parallel views of what it means to be creative.

  • Shayna Connelly
    Director
    Every Ghost Has an Orchestra, Quiver, Gardening at Night
  • Ailsa Connelly
    Key Cast
    "Self"
  • Justin T. Jones
    Director of Photography
    Artist Statement, Totalite
  • Katie Campos
    Location Sound
    Totalite
  • Molly Kate Lane
    Credits and Poster Design
    Artist Statement, Fucked Up Point Blank
  • Travis Duffield
    Sound Design
    Fucked Up Point Blank, Every Ghost Has an Orchestra
  • Shayna Connelly
    Editor
    Gardening at Night, Quiver, Every Ghost Has an Orchestra, Artist Statement, Fucked Up Point Blank
  • Project Type:
    Documentary, Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    6 minutes 56 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    January 1, 2020
  • Production Budget:
    500 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Sony FS5
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Athens International Film and Video Festival
    Athens, OH
  • Ethnografilm Paris
    Paris
    France
  • Kansas City FilmFest International
    Kansas City, MO
  • Sandy Dennis Film Festival
    Hastings, NE
  • Brooklyn Film Festival
    New York City, NY
    June 29, 2020
  • San Diego International Kids' Film Festival
    San Diego, CA
  • Splice Film Festival
    Brooklyn, NY
    June 18, 2020
    Finalist (Honorable Mention) Best Short Doc
  • Snake Alley Festival of Film
    Burlington, IA
    August 2, 2020
Director Biography - Shayna Connelly

Director Biography: Shayna Connelly’s films on ghosts and liminal spaces explore the boundaries between documentary, experimental and fictional forms. The 8-film anthology A Memory Palace for Ghosts illuminates hauntings that arise from traumatic events, mental illness, everyday routines, the search for truth and the aftermath of grief. Her current work explores the disconnect between perception and identity as a feminist, artist and mother.

Re-Director Biography: Ailsa Connelly is a grade schooler who enjoys YouTube reality shows, swimming and playing with her friends. She likes going to museums with her family but takes issue with Mapplethorpe because of all the nudity. Her favorite subjects in school are recess and art. She wants to be a teacher when she grows up. She persists in being bananas.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

Most portrayals of modern girlhood are fiction.

All children are creative with language and delight their parents with their insights, mispronunciations and cute phrasing. As the lone family extrovert, my daughter talked (and talks) non-stop, formulating her ideas in the process of speaking, often with bizarre results. There is no censorship of thought, no consideration of propriety, no inkling that her voice could be devalued for being female. Her utterances are surreal, beautiful and hilarious. She is an outspoken, direct and brutally honest human who is also caring and optimistic.

Bananas Girl is aware of her audience and enjoys delighting them with non-sequiturs, absurd questions [“wait, is this my face?”] and visual metaphors. When she went to Kindergarten, I waited for her divergent thinking to fade and be replaced is by the rule- and logic-oriented thinking instilled through our educational system. But at the end of grade school her creative world view persists. She has changed, certainly, but her poet’s heart hangs on.