'12th and Delaware' filmmakers: from 'Jesus Camp' to the abortion issue

Reporting from Park City, Utah — It's not like Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing are new to the making of powerful documentaries. But even for them "12th and Delaware," which debuted Sunday at Sundance, was a disturbing, unnerving experience they don't hesitate to describe as life-changing. When Ewing half-jokingly tells someone, "I hope it haunts you for the rest of your days," she is referring as well to what it did to them.

To say that the subject of their heart-rending new film is abortion in America is in some ways not saying enough. In a style that is more powerful for being low-key -- "the whole thing is like a whisper," says Grady -- "12th and Delaware" focuses on two establishments that share a corner in Fort Pierce, Fla., as well as on the women who patronize them, but it goes deeper than that.

"It's beyond being into their heads," Grady says. "We're inside their hearts."

On one side of the street is an abortion clinic, and on the other is an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center (or CPC), one of more than 4,000 such places in the U.S. set up to look like clinics but with the purpose of persuading women to continue with their pregnancy.

These establishments have never previously been filmed from the inside and Grady and Ewing only heard about them because a mother of one of the children they followed in their earlier "Jesus Camp" worked at a CPC that actually shared a partition (dubbed "The Wailing Wall") with an abortion clinic.

Because they found the CPCs, in Ewing's words, "upsetting, shocking, disturbing, confusing," they were not eager to make one of them the subject of their next film. "We wanted to move on, we were tired, weary of conservative America." But Sheila Nevins, who runs documentaries for HBO, was compelled by the idea, and so the film was begun. It was not an easy process.

For one thing, it took Grady and Ewing a year and a half to gain access to a facility. Then it took a year of filming to get the job done, a year that the filmmakers, who call 12th and Delaware "that miserable corner," say was the most difficult and challenging of their careers.

Initially, the film was to be only about the CPC, and Grady and Ewing make being there sound like combat. "It was excruciating," says Ewing, "like Lars von Trier had assigned us to make a Dogme film on this corner for a year."

Adds Grady, "It was banality and flashes of total emotional drama, flashes that would send you to the moon."