Street roots
M arch 1, 2013
AMERICAN WINTER from page 4
more money, they take away your housing
assistance or food stamps so you’re put
back to the point where you are stuck at
the very edge. The goal should be to get
people on their feet and live a life that’s
comfortable. And I don’t mean cushy. I
mean you don’t spend every minute of
e v e r y d a y o n h o w y o u ’r e g o i n g t o k e e p y o u r
head above water.
Harry: A lot of people are frustrated
with social services, but put yourself in
their position where they got into this to
help people and you have more people
needing your help, and there are cuts to
resources for people needing your help and
there are fewer resources.
Joe: Commissioner Nick Fish said in the
film that it’s cheaper by far to help people
before they completely fall through the
safety net and become homeless. Our
experience has been that the vast majority
of people we talked to and followed in
Portland was that they worked their entire
life, they wanted nothing more than to get
off of social services as fast as they could
and they just wanted a means to support
their family and the amount of support they
got was not enough. If they did get a job
that kind of got them ahead a little bit, but
they were faced with a corresponding cut to
their housing help of food stamps.
J.T .: A fter m aking this documentary do
you think Am erica is a fa ir place?
Joe: [Pause] Fair place meaning
everyone has a shot to succeed?
Above, one o f the fam ilies from “Am erican
W in ter” T .J., (center) with his son an d
K ristian . A t right, people stand in line fo r
food assistance in another scene from the
documentary, film e d in Portland.
P H O T O S B Y D E V O N TERRILL7 C O U R T E S Y H B O
J.T.: Sure.
Joe: No, I don’t really think so. The
statistics in this film that show that poverty
is growing and the predictor if you’ll get
ahead in this country and succeed is most
often determined by the wealth of your
family. There are all kinds of reasons when
we ask people who were struggling if they
felt they had a shot at the American dream.
Most of the kids as well as the adults said
they really didn’t feel like that was their
reality.
J.T.: You got some great material fo r this
documentary, some really candid moments. I
was wondering how you fo u n d these fam ilies
and developed a rapport with them.
Joe: That is our speciality, capturing life
in progress, and we just spent a lot of time.
You try to establish a rapport and you fade
into the background and let their life go on
as if you’re not there. We never tried to
influence that in any way, and when we’re
filming these things we try to be a fly on
the wall as much as we can, and, in time,
people warm up, and they go back to being
themselves.
There’s a lot of shame in being poor and
needing social services, so we were asking
them to open up completely for us.
So does
Street Roots.
Harry: The kids even spoke to the
shame by not telling their friends where
they live. I see a 40-year movement in the
media starting with the Reagan
administration to demonize people who
receive social services, with the welfare
queen and the 47 percent and we found the
opposite to be true. Sure, there’s some
fraud in the system, but the majority of
people there are because of some
unforeseen circumstances. They want to
work. They want to support their family.
They want the dignity of a job. The
stereotype is very different, and you can
find that, but after listening in on thousands
of phone calls and visiting with hundreds of
families you find that’s not the case.
J.T.: Are there any moments in m aking the
film that haunt you or resonate with you?
Joe: There were a lot of moments. It’s
extremely hard to be with folks who are
going through very difficult times, including
not having enough to eat. You’re with a film
crew and you know when you break you’re
going to go with the crew and get a meal,
and you’re going to go back in a
comfortable environment, and they are in
danger of losing their electricity. It was
.difficult to be part of the film in that
respect.
We made a trailer of the film, and in the
trailer we paid the people at the end of the
day. We paid them what we considered not
a lot of money ... But what we didn’t realize
is that they were so desperate that the
amount of money we were giving them was
changing their situation totally. So when we
decided we were done shooting then we
paid them. It was just very hard.
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