Battling

Documentarian Maximilien Dejoie confesses he was feeling the stress while following his subject for Ji.hlava doc fest main competition title “Everything Works Out (in the End).”

His road movie account of an American artist who moves quickly from a career as a stripper to would-be boxer to writer/musician while literally (in her view) fighting off demons, was challenging to capture, especially working solo with a handheld camera.

“It’s kind of liberating,” Dejoie says of making the doc this way, allowing him to follow Katelyn Louise Doty – or just Kate more usually – wherever she goes…even when she reverses course on a life direction, sending the film plot into question.

As audiences learned following Dejoie’s screening at the Czech Republic’s top doc event, he followed Doty from Chicago across the northeastern U.S. for months and was rarely given a second chance if he missed something.

“I had to compose my camera and my microphones in a way that I could handle it at any time,” he says. “You have to think about composition and focus and this and that all the time…I think the most challenging thing at that time was to capture the moment – because Kate did not wait for me.”

Invariably Doty would say compelling things when not on camera and if Dejoie ever asked her to revisit that while he was rolling, the answer would be pitiless.

“She would say, ‘No, I said it. The moment is gone.’”

Dejoie acknowledges the shoot was also tough on Doty, who hosted him in her living space and essentially lived on camera during the shoot while going through titanic personal changes.

“I was very interested in how she was describing the strip club life,” the director says, “in a very non-victimizing way.” If anything, Doty seemed empowered by her work in a rowdy rock club, married to musician Chip Z’Nuff.

Raised in a traditional Catholic home, Doty, out of economic necessity, had decided to pay off her debts by working in the adult entertainment industry, hoping the job would just be a temporary solution. But years later, when she felt the work had become a defining chapter in her life, she decided to change things up and reconnect with her faith.

She began working in a retirement home for aging Catholic priests and devoted herself to creative pursuits: recording her first album, writing a book, and, somehow characteristically, then deciding to take up boxing.

“I shot a lot of material I didn’t end up using,” says Dejoie, who thought once Doty stepped into the ring he would have a compelling plotline for his film. But the phase passed and turned out not to be the answer she was looking for in life.

It wasn’t the first curveball he was thrown while shooting. Shortly after he arrived in the Chicago area to begin the project, Doty informed him, as he puts it, “that she was possessed by a demon” and would need an exorcism.

As for his own thoughts on the question of demons and exorcism, Italian-born Dejoie says he personally has trouble believing such things are real – but admits that sometimes when around Doty, that position can be challenging to maintain.

At one point, he says, Doty finally allowed him to film her praying – something she had refused to agree to up to then.

Afterward, Doty said to him, “If you have questions, you can ask them now. Because I’m not going to allow you to shoot this again.”

When Dejoie needed a fresh data card for the camera, he began rolling again — and found himself accidentally recording over the praying shots. It was something he’d never done before as a veteran camera operator and director.

She tells me, “Well, there you go. The demons don’t like you photographing this.”

“Even though I’m not a believer, in that moment, that circumstance, for a moment I thought…uhhh.”

The exorcism experience led Doty to what he calls “a meditation on faith and redemption.”

Feeling the need to reconnect with her roots, she left Chicago and hit the road, crossing the United States towards her hometown in Massachusetts, during the last days before the 2024 presidential election.

It was during this more contemplative phase of Doty’s life, which the director filmed with a slower pace, leaving both the audience and his subject with space to breathe, that Dejoie realized he had his story.

He knew the film would close on this return to a quieter life, in which Doty says what she wants most after everything is the chance “to be nobody.”

Dejoie says he knew he could finally put the camera down and the film would arise from whatever it was the two had just recorded together over so much space and time.

He told himself: “It’s going to just see her going back home and I’m going to build it from what I have.”