TJ and Tara worry that one day soon they’ll be kicked out of their home. They had managed to keep their finances in good shape for a while, but then TJ, the breadwinner for a family of five, got laid off. So Tara picked up the slack, working 12-hour shifts earning $8.75/hour, not nearly enough to cover the bills piled on the counter. Afraid child protection services might remove the kids from the home because utilities had been cut off, the couple considers ways to make money. Like panhandling.
“I’m not holding no fricking sign,” TJ says. He pauses. “Yet.”
Jeannette, on the other hand, doesn’t have a partner to help earn money. Her husband died, so when she couldn’t afford their place, she and her 11-year-old son Gunner moved into a garage. The place lacks windows and heat. Hungry and short on cash, Jeannette takes Gunner to a chain restaurant that offers a pay-what-you-can menu — but when mother and son arrive, the doors are locked. Gunner asks, “Now what do we do?”
The 48.5 million people in the U.S. living in poverty might ask similar questions. The U.S. Census Bureau reports there are now more poor people in the country than at any time over the past 50 years. More than 16 million of them are children. What does it say about our country when so many people live in poverty?
Filmmaker Joe Gantz wondered the same thing. Along with his brother Harry, the Emmy-award winning directors set out to make a film about poverty in America. For several months during the winter of 2011-2012, Gantz tracked numerous families in Portland, Ore. that teetered on the brink of poverty. Some of their stories — including those of TJ and Tara, Jeannette and Gunner — form the narrative arc of “American Winter,” an HBO documentary that follows families as they sign into shelters, seek out social service agencies and cope with jury-rigged apartments and homes without water and electricity. It’s sobering work, and in April the film won a Sidney Award for journalism in the service of the common good.
Joe Gantz will be on hand for a free local screening of the film, co-presented by the Washington Budget & Policy Center, Working Washington and Seattle University, on June 18 at 6:30 p.m. at SIFF Cinema Uptown.
Prior to the event, Gantz spoke by phone about why he and his brother set the film in Portland, the difficulty of keeping journalistic distance and the financial perils of being a documentary filmmaker.
What caused you to undertake this project?
Well, as the economic downturn got going, my brother Harry and I were noticing that there were more people out of work than at any time over the last 80 years, and more people underemployed or working part-time jobs. At this time of the greatest need in several generations, we were struck by the fact that, as a country, we didn’t come together and say, “How do we all figure out a way to get people back to work?” Instead we kind of went in the opposite direction and said we’re going to cut budgets and services all across the country. Harry and I felt this is something very unique that we’re going through as a nation, and we wanted to try and document that, how it was affecting families across the country.
So that being said, the trick was: How do you find the families at their moment of crisis? We learned about 2-1-1 [a nonprofit phone service that provides free information to local social services], and we decided that we would find a 2-1-1 that would let us listen to all the phone calls coming in and talk to the people who called and say, “What would you think about [us] following your life over the next several months?” And that’s what we did.
We didn’t wanna do a 2-1-1 in LA or New York or Chicago or any other big cities, ’cause we thought that middle America would say, “Well, that’s not us; that’s not our problem.” So we wanted a city that wasn’t too big and would feel relatable, and Portland kinda fit the bill.
What was the most surprising thing you learned in making this movie?
Hard to say the most surprising. I’d say the most shocking was to realize the level of stress that parents are living with day in, day out, morning, noon and night, as they’re not able to cover their bills, and they’re just struggling to keep a roof over their head and keep food on the table for their families. Those parents, they’re trying to create a bit of a bubble around the kids so they can be kids and do well in school, but it’s such a precarious position: They’re working usually part-time or full-time for low-paying jobs, and then they’re trying to get social services, which is another full-time job. It’s just an incredible amount of stress.
One of the things that got me about the film is that these families, these parents, are under stress, but, from what I saw, the families all seem to stick together.
Yeah, there is a certain feeling of “We’re in this together; we love each other: We don’t have a lot.” And in some sense that tends to pull the family closer together in many cases.
The other amazing thing that I learned doing this film that surprised me: The country, we have a mental block against helping people. We don’t mind food stamps, which means keeping people from starving, but we are not really, as a country, thinking, “How do we get this person back on their feet, back in a job and back [to being] a contributing member of society?” It’s just so counterproductive because it’s cheaper and so much better for society to reach out to people who are struggling and help them get back on their feet in a meaningful way.
A number of the people in the film talked about how embarrassed they were to be in a shelter or being homeless or having the electricity turned off.
Or just being poor.
Right. So how did you get them to agree to be on film?
Well, let me say first that the reason that poor people aren’t a powerful voting block is because they feel so ashamed. They feel so isolated, and they feel like they don’t want to tell anybody because there’s all these preconceptions and these stereotypes that say that people who are poor, they somehow created this situation: They’re not working hard enough, they’re not trying hard enough, they’re lazy or they’re takers. This shame keeps them from being open and banding together. Half this country is in poverty or near poverty, and that is a tremendous amount of people. And, in a democracy, if you can get those people to vote towards their concerns, you could change things profoundly.
But to address how we got them to participate, you have to realize that when someone is poor and needs help and social services, they go to try to get help. They wait in line, they wait on the phone, they’re faced with a lot of indifference. They just feel like nobody cares. Suddenly a documentary company is saying, “We really wanna follow your story, we wanna tell your story, we wanna show what you’re going through.” I think this gave these people a voice. Someone wanted to listen and tell their point of view, and you go from feeling tremendously isolated and alone to feeling you can talk to someone, and they listen. So we have eight families in the film, but we interviewed about 75 to 90, and we followed about 25, just to see what their life was like.
How, when you have 75 families, do you choose 25 to follow and then select eight to be in the film?
We actually were listening to phone calls and interviewing people for five months. Once we interviewed those people, we had to think about a number of different factors: Some people had gone through a crisis or a series of crises and their lives were on the way back up; some people were having an isolated incident. Once we choose a subject, we don’t influence what their story is: We just follow and we try to stay in the background as much as possible. So we needed to pick people that were really comfortable being themselves in front of the camera.
But it’s really not about these families particularly. It’s about something that’s going on all across this country to millions of families, and I felt that by having a lot of families you would get this feeling that tons of people are dealing with this. And, in fact, when you think about it, the poverty in these families is not exceptional. You could find families that are a lot poorer or a lot more destitute.
You said you don’t influence what happens, but these families are in crisis. How difficult is that to witness as a filmmaker and not influence their lives?
Very difficult. You’re with people sometimes that cannot afford adequate food for their families. You’re with people that are in danger of losing their home — or lose it. So it’s very difficult. We made a little test pilot a year before we started the film, and while we made that, we paid people. We always pay people a smallish amount when we make a documentary. We don’t wanna pay ’em a lot because you don’t want people to want to be a part of a documentary in order to make a living, but you wanna pay them something for their time. And, as I say, it’s not a lot of money.
Are you going to say how much?
For the pilot, I think we paid something like $100 for a half a day of shooting. But that amount would completely change their mood and their life. Maybe we’d worked with them a full day or two half days, so that $200 meant a lot to them, and it completely changed their story. So when we came to the film, we decided we had to make an agreement that we would pay them the money at the end of shooting.
I did break that rule towards the end, because I felt we were close to the end of the story, and it wasn’t going to make a tremendous difference. But at the beginning it was very hard to be with people, and they’re struggling and they’re dealing with so much stress and chaos. And [then] you pack up and leave. It was very difficult.
How did the people talk about the experience of being in the film?
Well, let me tell you a little aside: I had to raise money as we were making this film because we had about a third of the budget when we started. I spent time making the film, but I spent an equal amount of time trying to raise the money. So we had a trailer, we sent that around to people and people would tell me, “This is too sad. This is too sad. You can’t make a film like this. It has to be much more positive. People can’t deal with it.”
Now there may be some truth to that if you wanna make a film that’s commercial, that [to] have as wide an audience as possible, it has to fit a formula where it comes to a happy ending. I think that this situation in our country is tremendously out of whack, and we’ve been going in this direction for 35 years, where we have rising poverty, rising income inequality, stagnating wages, where we’re demonizing folks who need help instead of helping them. So it is a sad situation, and I didn’t go out to make a sad film. My goal was to show what’s really happening out there, and this is what’s happening out there.
What’s your experience of poverty? Have you ever been homeless? Have you ever been broke?
Yeah, I’ve been broke, but I’ve never been homeless. I make documentary films, so there’s been times where our debts are humongous. So I’m technically worse than broke [laughs]: I’m in deep debt. But I have credit lines, and I have not felt in danger of losing our house, although my wife has told me that we might be in danger of losing our house. You know, I tried to refinance my house lately, like other people did, and can’t do it. So I don’t feel like I have any experience that’s remotely like these folks, but I have struggled financially as a filmmaker.
Where do you live?
Woodlawn Hills, Calif.
How is poverty expressed there?
You know the [San Fernando] Valley, in LA?
A little bit. I lived in Venice, Calif., for a short time.
Well, the valley is sort of this humongous suburb. I think there’s three million people. It’s very different than Venice or Santa Monica, where you see a lot of homeless people. For some reason there’s very few homeless people visible in this part of the valley, but I’m very well aware that this tremendous amount of poverty is below the surface. From doing this film, you realize that families that are in your neighborhood are on the verge of losing their houses. There’s someone two houses over that hasn’t had a job for two years. So, making this film makes you aware that you just can’t go by what you’re used to thinking: “Oh that person’s homeless. I see them on the street begging.” There’s just a tremendous amount of poverty that is not immediately visible.
Have you checked in on these families? Do you know how they’re doing?
Yeah, they’re gonna be at the screening in Seattle. All of them.
Really?
I’m bringing them up on a bus.
I’ve seen ’em many times. I stay in touch with ’em. A lot of them are involved with helping us do publicity, and they go around with us. Three of our subjects are going to Washington to testify about their experiences and about policies that affect working families. [Ore.] Sen. [Jeff] Merkley [of the Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs Senate Committee] is a big fan of the film. He wanted the senators, many of which never experience anything remotely like poverty and don’t understand what it’s like, to hear these people talk.
Did you have any idea that when you started making this film that some of the people would speak to a senator in D.C.?
No. I didn’t want to make a film to make a splash and get some good reviews. My brother and I wanted a film that would open people’s eyes so that we could potentially help to change policy. So I can’t say that I didn’t envision something happening. We’ve done a number of these screenings, and they can make an impact so we’re gonna try to keep this up. It’s been hard for us to raise enough money to keep this going, but as long as we can, we’re going to.