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Filmmaker who gives voice to “rebels” spotlights the work of helping girls escape abuse

Dreamcatcher 01

Award-winning British filmmaker Kim Longinotto’s films include Divorce Iranian Style, looking at that country’s courts; Shinjuku Boys, about a group of women in Japan living as men; The Day I Will Never Forget, about girls in Kenya challenging female genital mutilation; and Sisters in Law, following two women working in the courts in a small town in Cameroon, trying to help others advocate for victims of abuse.

For her insight, empathy, and compassionate portraits of fascinating people in these films and many others, Longinotto recently received the Persistence in Vision Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where her latest movie, Dreamcatcher, screened. Dreamcatcher, which is now airing on Showtime, follows Brenda Myers-Powell, a former prostitute who now works in a jail as well as at a high school with “high-risk” girls. She also does unpaid outreach under the banner of The Dreamcatcher Foundation to get girls and women out of the sex trade in Chicago. In Dreamcatcher, we see Myers-Powell cruising the streets in her van, offering condoms and support to women, having her former pimp, now a friend, talk to girls about how abusers operate, and supporting her sister-in-law whose child she has adopted. No matter what, Myers-Powell remains nonjudgmental, assuring the women and girls she has been there and treating everyone with respect and compassion. Longinotto captures intimate and intense moments, such as one scene in which Brenda, intending to talk to the girls she works with abut how not to get pressured into sex, finds out that most of them have been raped already—often by family members or family friends. Hearing such raw stories from the teenagers is shocking, but Longinotto says access has never been a problem for her.

“The very first thing we did was we went into the school, and I showed them bits of Sisters in Law,” Longinotto said. “I told them I would be making the film with them, that it wouldn’t be interviews and formal, and we’d do it together.”

Rachel Rosen, the director of programming at the San Francisco Film Society, which organizes the SFIFF, finds this scene remarkable—and typical of what Longinotto does.

“The fact that the camera is there, and there is someone to listen to what these girls have to say and be nonjudgmental, is so incredible,” she said. “I don’t think anyone could watch that and not be shocked by the prevalence of abuse. And at the end Brenda says to all of them, ‘It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault,’ and it seems so important for them to hear that.”

Longinotto has an ability to find subjects, mostly women, with great perseverance, so that in spite of the often extremely dark circumstances, viewers are left feeling hopeful, as in Dreamcatcher, Rosen says.

Longinotto feels being a woman helps her.

“In Iran all the women wanted to talk to me. It’s like you’re in a club immediately,” she said. “I’ve made five films in Japan, and everyone [in the UK] always told me they’re so secretive, they won’t talk to you. They opened up immediately. They said, ‘Oh, you’re girls, you look like us.’”

There’s another reason people open up to her on camera.

“I think it’s the kind of people I like filming—they’re all rebels,” she said. “They’re all a part of change of some sort, and they want to be witnessed.”

Longinotto is clearly something of a rebel herself. She went to the National Film and Television School in London, and while there she made a movie, Pride of Place, about the girls’ boarding school she had attended, where officials punished her for getting lost on a trip by forbidding the other students to talk to her. At 17 she ran away from the school and for a while lived on the streets. Her own hard times make her empathetic to the people in her films and their struggles.

“Brenda couldn’t be more an outsider,” she said. “She wouldn’t want some uptight posh person who’s going to make her feel bad about herself.”

Her approach to making a movie differs from many other documentary filmmakers, who can spend days or weeks with their subjects before turning on a camera and once they start filming, record everything. Longinotto never films more than she can watch in a week, and she goes in with a clear idea of what she wants.

Longinotto is often described as an observational filmmaker. That’s not quite the way she sees it—she thinks of herself as a participant, involved with the people she’s filming and their lives. “When those girls were telling stories about getting raped, tears were running down my cheeks,” she said. “Afterwards I had to go hug them and tell them I love them.”

Rosen wouldn’t describe her as observational either. “Collaborative is a better word,” she said. “There’s nothing staged or fake about what she’s doing—she’s there in service of people she’s filming. I feel like she just completely gives herself and all her talents in service of the subjects of her films.”

Longinotto loves telling the stories of the people she makes movies about.

“Most of us, filmmakers and journalists, we’re doing this because we don’t fit in, and we want to give people a voice,” she said. “I was never very good at being a child or a teenager, and when I found filmmaking, I felt I was able to be myself. The people I film are my soul mates in a way.”



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