People love having their stories heard, says acclaimed documentary maker Kim Longinotto
Kim Longinotto’s Dreamcatcher is a compelling documentary centred on the remarkable Brenda Myers-Powell. A former prostitute and drug addict, she now runs a foundation helping other women to get off the streets of Chicago. The film, which picked up a prize at Sundance, is also a shattering account of the abuse experienced by many girls and young women in the city’s ghettos.
“When Lisa Stevens, the producer, asked me to make the film, I thought, Oh, prostitution on the streets of Chicago… I thought I might be a very depressing film.
“I don’t like making films that are about victims. Because I think when you watch them you don’t just feel bad, and often it doesn’t mean anything in your own life.
“But then I saw a little trailer she made and Brenda was so full of life and so full of joy. She seemed like such fun. She seemed like somebody I’d like to know.
“I kind of fell in love with her. I thought, I love this woman, I want to be her friend.
“I just thought, I’m really lucky to be asked to make this film so my view changed totally. And it was a joy making it with her.”
This woman Brenda Myers-Powell really is incredible. She has an awful backstory but has come through it and is now a really strong community leader in Chicago. Do you need somebody like her to kind of carry a film like this?
“No, it doesn’t need to be someone like Brenda. It can be an eight-year-old girl. It can be a 10-year-old orphan. The stories I like are good stories where something’s going to happen, there’s a transformation.
“The films I don’t like are the films where the person stays the same all the way through and you don’t get to know them. I quite like Spiderman, but sort of the Spiderman thing.
“The films I love are like The Lives of Others, the German film, where somebody changes and they become a different person in front of your eyes.”
“No, I think you see it all the time in Brenda. You see her remaking herself every day. You see her having very low moments, when she temporarily feels defeated.
“Then she puts on the false eyelashes and she gets the wig – a different wig for every mood – and she gears herself up and goes back to battle. And that’s what I love about her.”
What were the particular challenges of making the film?
“Every film is a journey and I think it’s always frightening because you think, Is something going to happen? I like it when things happen in front of your eyes, where the story unfolds and you follow a story and it’s very, very dramatic and real.
“I’m always scared that nothing’s going to happen or the story won’t be good. That’s always the challenge and the fear.
“And then there were wonderful moments where people just took ownership of their stories and started to change their lives.
“We were lucky enough to be able to fill them and those were the joyful moments in the film.”
In the entire film only a few faces are pixilated. There were people speaking very openly, for example at a group for former prostitutes or prostitutes at a women’s prison. Were you surprised at how open they were to speaking to you?
“No, I wasn’t at all surprised at how open they were. Because in my experience people love being heard. They were all people that had never been heard.
“People that had experiences that they’d kept inside themselves. If they had told anyone they weren’t believed. And here at last they had an opportunity for a witness.
“The pixilated faces by the way are law enforcement officers who would be at risk if people knew who they were. They’re undercover police in a conference. That’s the only time we pixilated anybody.”
“I never felt an outsider, and I never do when I’m making these films, because everybody I was filming was living on the margins, everybody had felt low self-esteem in some way and were remaking themselves.
“Brenda remakes herself every day by helping other people. And I think the reason a lot of us make documentary films or we write articles or we write novels is because we felt outsiders growing up and most of our lives really.
“I think we got on immediately and we became friends immediately. And we recognised each other as being people who maybe never really fitted in.”
The film is made in Chicago and there’s quite a contrast between aerial shots of the rich city and the shocking poverty some of these people seem to be in. Could this film be set in any major city in the States? Or is the subject specific to Chicago?
“The film is about Chicago. At the beginning of the film you see an almost fairytale city with all the beautiful buildings and the lights.
“And then you go onto the streets and you realise that it’s a very segregated city, which is one of the things that shocked me at first.
“You have the sort of white areas where everything works and then you have the black areas where plants are growing in the roads and none of the streetlights work and where people are really poor.
“But it’s not really about a city. It could be any place. It’s about families, it’s about the secrets and lies that we all grow up in.
“My family probably would have seemed very pleasurable if you were coming from outside. In fact, some of my friends used to say, Oh, I really like your parents. And I used to say, You don’t know what it’s like to live with them.
“So I think for a lot of us who grew up in difficult families, we recognise a lot of things in the film.
“So I hope that anyone watching the film would relate to it in their own way.
“When we showed the film first in Sundance lots of people came up to Brenda afterwards. A girl said, You’ve inspired me, I’m going to stay at college. You’ve inspired me to keep going.
“But also a woman said to Brenda that she’d been in a violent relationship all her life and that Brenda had really spoken to her in the film and she was going to leave. So I think it can affect you in a positive, joyful way.”
I must say though that I thought the film was a kind of indictment of America. That people could be hungry, that the social services could be apparently so weak. These people seem to be relatively poorly or even very poorly educated, and inarticulate.
“The reason that Sharita for example doesn’t go to school is that her family’s out of control. And the only way her mother feels she can get food and to look after her family is to have more and more babies.
“So there’s a lot of weird things going on there, a lot of disturbing things. You get to know a whole neighbourhood where people are hopeless, where people don’t really think about completing their education.
“That’s what Brenda’s there for. To say to them, You can do it, stay at school, don’t get pregnant, don’t go with boys.
“That’s an amazing scene where all the girls in the class reveal one by one that they’ve been with men since they were four, a lot of them.
“The rape and abuse has been happening in the family – usually by a family member or people known to a family.
“I think that’s what we cover up a lot in Europe. We say, Don’t talk to strangers.
“We pretend it’s somebody outside that’s going to threaten our children. When always it’s in the family and family is often the most dangerous place to be.”
What would you say was the biggest thing you learned making the film?
“There’s a scene that particularly affected me in the film, which is when Brenda’s daughter comes to the school and she’s talking to the girls.
“One of the girls says to her, When did you first discover that your mum was a prostitute?
“And Brenda’s daughter said, As early as I can remember, we always knew mum was a prostitute. We were abused wherever we were staying. We didn’t see mum for 11 years, we lived in a horrible place and we just learnt to depend upon each other.
“You see Brenda looking very, very shocked and reliving it. Then the daughter says, We knew mum loved us. We knew she couldn’t help what she was in, that the same had happened to her. And we loved our mum.
“I said to Brenda afterwards, Brenda, you’ve got to listen to your daughter, you have to let it go. And in saying it to Brenda, I was saying it to myself as well.
“There were things that I’d done in my past that I felt guilty about. And I also had to listen and let it go.”
You’ve made many films. A couple of them have been shown here at One World in the past. Would you say there’s a particular thread running through all of your work?
“I think the thread running through all of my work is probably rebels. Celebrating rebels, pioneers.
“But also the more films I make, the more complex it gets. The more the people who you might think at the beginning are bad people are people that are trapped in society themselves.
“I think all the films I make are challenging tradition, challenging authority, challenging particular mindsets. I’m trying to set us free from them.
“It could be a tradition that locks girls up at the age of 11, as soon as they reach puberty.
“But we see it in this film, too. We see Homer, who’s probably the closest you’ll ever get to a baddie…”
He’s a former pimp.
“Yes, he’s a former pimp, and he’s like the Joker in Batman. But you learn that he was also a victim, if you like. He was abused. He thought it was a love affair, but he was raped by his aunt from the age of nine.
“As children do, he just thought that was normal. And thought it was a love affair.
“He’s not somebody that you can like. He’s very hard to like. But the film makes it quite hard to hate him as well.
“We discover that he was Pimp of the Year, and that Snoop Dogg gave him a plaque saying, You are Pimp of the Year. And Pimp of the Year means you’re the pimp that’s made the most money. So you’re the person that’s done the most harm.
“I used to listen to Snoop Dogg, I still do – there’s a lovely song in the film, on the radio, that’s about how we celebrate things that are actually the most damaging and the most dangerous. And we don’t see beneath it.
“In the song this man’s going, Can’t you control your bitches? Then Snoop Dogg sings, You are the one, you are the one.
“You hear him grooming, luring a girl by praising her, by giving her love. And all the prostitutes are desperate for love – so you see the two sides of it.”
