Part of Blind Justice, a four-part Channel 4 series on women and the law
An animated documentary based on the true story of Josie O'Dwyer, with her own voice as personal commentary. The film shows the devastating effect that detention and imprisonment have on young girls who are sent in "for their own protection".
The impact of Some Protection owes much to her ability to evoke visually and kinetically the moods, emotions and feelings of the protagonist, Josie O'Dwyer, as she narrates the true story of her experiences of detention and imprisonment.
James Leahy, The Guardian, 5 November 1987
It is widely assumed that documentary is about Griersonian grit, Flaherty fact and Wiseman wisdom, but this is to neglect the rich and varied tradition of documentary in the animated film. From Winsor McCay's Sinking of the Lusitania, to Marjut Rimminen's subjective documentary Some Protection, to Jan Svankmajer's The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia. Animation has documented the personal, social and political events that have shaped the world.
Dr Paul Wells, National Film Theatre lecture, November 1996
As an animator, I function best in my room, in a kind of solitary confinement. When Josie says the only escape from horrible reality was to go inside her head, I understood that very well.
Marjut Rimminen, Jayne Pilling, Women and Animation, BFI
Free to stream at the Internet Archive, uploaded by producer Orly Yadin
On the Blind Justice DVD from Yadin Productions, with the other three films of the series
On the DVD of Tricky Women: AnimationsfilmKunst von Frauen (Schüren, Marburg, 2011)
Broadcast on Channel 4 in February 1990 under the series title In Justice, renamed at the last minute because the BBC had a drama called Blind Justice (The Lost Continent)
In the exhibition Animation at the Cutting Edge, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 1992, which showed artwork and screenings of the film and of The Stain
In Captured in Frame, a film festival of imprisonment organised by NACRO, Commonwealth Institute, London, 1993, with a debate
In the celebration programme Ten Years of Award-winning Animation at Channel 4, British Academy of Film and Television Arts, London, 1994
Original artwork and sets in Animation Plus, a thirteen-venue tour from Glasgow in February 1994 to London in January 1996, with The Stain
In the programme British Women Animate at the Tampere International Short Film Festival, 1995, with The Stain and I'm not a Feminist, but…, where Marjut gave an interview to YLE
In the lecture Animation and the documentary form by Dr Paul Wells, National Film Theatre, London, November 1996
In a programme of British documentaries at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1999
In a programme of animated films made by women at the AniMadrid Festival, 2004, with The Stain
In a programme of world animated documentary films presented by Marjut at the Finnish/Scottish film seminar No Comments, Edinburgh, 2005
In Marjut’s making-of presentation at IDFA, Amsterdam, 2007
In the AnimaDoc programme at DocPoint, the Helsinki documentary film festival, 2009, in a presentation by Marjut with Learned by Heart
In the Tony Fish Lifetime Achievement Award retrospective at the Bradford Animation Festival, 2009
In A Caring Eye: The Documentary Way, introduced by Clare Kitson at the Bradford Animation Festival, 9 to 13 November 2010
In the documentary film event Toden näköistä at Kiasma, Helsinki, 2013, with Learned by Heart
In 100 vuotta suomalaista animaatiota, the Animatricks online gallery, February to May 2014
Secret Cinema13 March 2007, Curzon Soho, London: the premiere of Learned by Heart, with Many Happy Returns and Some Protection, followed by a conversation with Gareth Evans; organised by animate! and the Finnish Institute
"Arguably, this is a more truthful reality and one which is only possible to document in animation." Paul Wells, Understanding Animation, Routledge, 1998. Some Protection is the book's worked example of the documentary tendency in animation, a film that shows Josie O'Dwyer's reality as she experienced it (page 27).
Annabelle Honess Roe, Animated Documentary, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. The book places Some Protection in the Blind Justice series (page 13); its case study of animated memory is Marjut's Learned by Heart.
"The final film, Some Protection by Marjut Rimminen, would attract the most accolades." Clare Kitson, British Animation: The Channel 4 Factor, Parliament Hill Books, 2008. On the Blind Justice series, in the history of Channel 4's animation commissioning.
Birgitt Wagner and Waltraud Grausgruber (eds), Tricky Women: AnimationsfilmKunst von Frauen, Schüren, Marburg, 2011. Some Protection is on the book's DVD. Reviewed by Sharon Katz in Animation World Network.
The Times, 17 August 1993, listing Some Protection with The Stain for television. Sight and Sound wrote about The Stain in October and November 1992.
Out of the Animation Ghetto, Animation World Network, on Clare Kitson's commissions for Channel 4, names Some Protection. The Lost Continent wrote about the Blind Justice series in 2010.
The British Cinema Source Book, 1995, lists the British Film Institute's viewing copy of Some Protection.
