Perhaps you've been asking yourself why they don't make more two-and-a-half-hour video documentaries about African-American rehabilitated crack addicts who recover their children from foster care after six years of separation and who then lose them again after their daughters give birth out of wedlock to HIV-positive babies. Or perhaps not. Here, if not an answer to a prayer, is at any rate an answer to the question. It is not a film for the faint of heart or the weak of resolve, although against the tallest of odds it manages to end on an upbeat. (Not a Happily Ever After; more of a Hold Your Breath.) A family-values nightmare -- notwithstanding the T-shirts that read "I'm a Fool for Jesus" and "Jesus on My Side" -- it concentrates on the guilt-laden relationship of the early-forties single mother and recovering junkie, Diane, and her second oldest daughter, Love, who has given birth to the HIV-positive bastard, Donyaeh, pronounced "don-YAY." (There are three other daughters, Tameka, Trenise a/k/a Tootie, and Morean, and a son, Willie, in addition to a departed son, Charles, who killed himself in his mother's absence.) After a knock-down-drag-out between Love and one of her sisters, Child Protective Services intervene to remove the younger children and the baby from Diane's public-housing apartment in Brooklyn. And the ensuing attempts, in some fashion, to reassemble the family through the legal labyrinth -- Love's appointed attorney is a pillar of sanity and stability, however harried -- provide both a storyline and an education. First-time filmmaker Jennifer Dworkin, who is white, found her way into the midst of all this through her volunteer work in a Harlem homeless shelter, where she met Diane's nephew and two nieces in a photography class. Her friendliness with the family over a period of several years -- and her inclusion of them in the filmmaking process, after the model of Robert Flaherty's ethnographic films among Eskimos and Polynesians -- has given her an entrée to heated arguments and unguarded moments that rival those in the home videos of Capturing the Friedmans. Nevertheless, even with interviews (disguised as "interior monologues") to flesh out the present-tense verité drama, there is often a sense of missing pieces and lost events. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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