POV Award: Kim Longinotto: Dreamcatcher

Description

Established in 1997, the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award each year honors the achievement of a filmmaker whose main body of work falls outside the realm of narrative feature filmmaking. Join renowned documentarian Kim Longinotto for an in-depth onstage conversation and a screening of her latest film, Dreamcatcher.

Filmmaker Kim Longinotto follows Brenda Myers-Powell as she roams the streets and halls of Chicago in this documentary that neither glamorizes sex work nor demonizes the women engaged in it. Rather, Longinotto’s steadfast camera bears witness to the traumatized lives and violated bodies that have pushed women down these dark paths. Dreamcatcher plunges headfirst into a female world of desperation, guided by Brenda, its remarkable heroine. Myers-Powell never lets anyone forget that she can do this work because she lived the life. She can only reach these women because she was one of them. Now she moves between worlds: coaching women in jail to respect themselves as survivors, tutoring girls in high school on the traps to avoid, addressing conferences on the realities of the street and guiding women out of danger–if they let her. Amid the chronicles of women saved and lost, the most shocking stories may be those that the high school girls reveal: at what young ages they were first raped in their own homes. An eyes-wide-open testimony to the ravaged lives of girls and women in America, Dreamcatcher offers hope in the four magic words that Myers-Powell offers up to everyone she meets: “It’s not your fault.” —B. Ruby Rich

Trailer

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Film Details