I'd like to thanks everyone who's followed our project. I've enjoyed reading your emails and tweets!! Thanks also to those who attended festivals and watched our humble little documentary!

With the conclusion of the CT Film Festival comes the end of the LoliGIrls festival circuit. I've received numerous requests for the documentary to be put up on YouTube, and now that the festivals are done I will think on how to best release this short film. It will be available for the general public online, but where and when it still TBD.

You might be wondering where we plan to go from here. For those of you who haven't been following this blog, the LoliGirls crew has changed a little and is now the "American Lolita" crew. We've decided to take our little film and embellish upon it. Our goal is to shoot a 60-65 min feature length documentary that will examine the lolita fashion subculture as it presently exists in the U.S. The documentary will focus more on why girls choose to wear this fashion, and what it says about young girls growing up in America today. We'll examine feminism, cyber-bullying, eating disorders, the media's portrayal of women, among many other issues. The film will use lolita as its prime example, a foil if you will, to examine all these other issues as they exist in our society today.

I know that's probably a poor explanation of the project, but this is the nature of documentaries...sometimes you don't know how you'll enlighten an issue, the footage you gather will decide that for you. So we have been shooting here and there, slowly gathering broll that we can use for a funding trailer. This is probably the main difference between "LoliGirls" and "American Lolita". LoliGirls was a pet project, something fun I wanted to do with my summer last year (that of course grew into a much larger production), and I channeled quite a bit of my own money into the project to have it come to fruition. I didn't make a dime on LoliGirls. "American Lolita" is a larger venture, and we will need money to have it made properly. This means we will also need to make some money off of it to cover all the money we've already invested into the project. In order to raise awareness of the project, and hopefully to aid our funding efforts, we've decided to completely redo this website and also to create a 'mook'. The mook will celebrate the American Lolita (of course!) and contain essays, interviews, lots and lots of photos, articles, and an index of lolita communities in the U.S. The mook will be sold (we're hoping for it to be finished early 2011) online and possible at cons. Besides bringing in a little money that we can then funnel into the project, we hope for the mook to shine some light on our project and spark some interest.

The mook and website are still in their infancy, and within a few months I sincerely hope we'll make some significant progress on both.

So stay tuned!!!