When Park City filmmaker Jill Orschel met DoriAnn, the polygamist's wife featured in her short documentary "Sister Wife," it was at a women's empowerment workshop.
"She and I totally hit it off when we met, really made this wonderful human connection," Orschel said this week.
It was four days later that someone told Orschel that DoriAnn was part of a polygamous family in a fundamentalist Mormon sect. "I didn't see her as a victim, but as a totally empowered woman who contradicted the stereotype," Orschel said.
The 11-minute documentary -- which plays Saturday as part of the first Documentary Film Festival at the University of Utah -- features DoriAnn talking to the camera about the jealousy she endures when her husband has sex with her sister wife (who is also her biological sister). The interview is intercut with images of DoriAnn's morning ritual of bathing, surrounded by lit candles, before the 20 children in her household (12 of them hers) wake up.
It took three years for Orschel and her co-producer, Alexandra Fuller, to gain DoriAnn's confidence. Orschel's plan was a cinema verite approach, being a fly on the wall through DoriAnn's daily life. But when an FLDS compound in Texas was raided a year ago, Orschel and Fuller felt they needed to move things along.
Then Orschel hit on the idea of filming DoriAnn's morning bath, which the filmmaker called "a wonderful visual metaphor, this baptism, this cleansing."
The short premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January (where it was paired with a documentary about domestic abuse in Iran), and recently won the Wholphin Award at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival in Austin, Texas. Next week, it will screen at the AFI Dallas International Film Festival and the Aspen Shortsfest in Aspen, Colo., Orschel's hometown.
Festival audiences have really connected with DoriAnn, Orschel said, which she believes reflects, along with HBO's hit series "Big Love," a widespread public interest in all things involving polygamy.
"It's something that's taboo, and very fascinating," Orschel said. Though Orschel said she wouldn't want to live in a polygamous marriage, she believes the title of "Big Love" has some truth to it. "After spending time with these people," Orschel said, "it does take big, humongous, unconditional love to be in this lifestyle."
The University of Utah festival continues Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Fort Douglas Post Theatre, 245 South Fort Douglas Blvd., U. campus, Salt Lake City. All screenings are free.
Friday's screening features films by students in the U.'s Film Studies Division.
Saturday's screening features two movies: "Sister Wife," Jill Orschel's short about the life of a woman in a polygamous marriage; and "Mayor Rocky and the Upstanders," Rhea Garvy's work-in-progress documentary about former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson.
