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Victim with resilience

An ex-prostitute woman is traveling around the streets of Chicago. Using her own gruesome experiences as a means, she helps others out of inferiority and a life that lasts.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Dreamcatcher
Director and photo: Kim Longinotto

In a near-lynching night sky, as enchanting as it is unreliable, we hover together with overview images that descend on a glittering metropolis. Below are skyscrapers as God-given gifts and candles that look like glowing gold.
Then we are taken down the street level and hear a story from the place where people live (or try to live): A woman named Brenda Myers-Powell spent 25 years of her life as a prostitute. She was shot five times, stabbed at thirteen, and one day she was baptized by a man who then ripped the skin off her face and body.
This woman thought she had lost her face forever, and "all she wanted was to get her face back – and to become a woman, because she could never remember being a woman."
This is how the documentary starts Dreamcatcher (2015). Brenda stands in a classroom and tells this story about herself.
The brutal vandalism is reminiscent of what Mexican journalist Sergio Gonzáles Rodriguez reported in an essay published in the August issue of Le Monde diplomatique, "The taxi stops abruptly", an outraged testimony of a country riddled with corruption, torture and violence: The body of Julio César Fuentes Mondragón, one of the students who was kidnapped in Guerrero on September 26 last year, was found with his eyes torn out and his skin peeled off his face.
As Rodriguez writes in a reflection on the dehumanization of this violence, and hypothetically assuming the position of the perpetrator:
"I tear out your eyes so you don't see me and what I'm doing to you, and you either can't see yourself at your last minute or understand what I'm going to do to you. My anonymity is yours, I separate you from your face and transform you into myself. ”
What the hell are we capable of doing with each other? As these stories attest, humanization is part of what we call the human. This is part of what sets us apart from the animals. When Aristotle spoke of man as a rational being, he accounted for this morbid impulse: rational man is capable of actions far worse than the violence of the beasts. It is the system of reason that tortures, which treats its kinsmen as enduring, which is capable of depriving people of their sense of being human.
Unlike the young boy Julio, Brenda survived the dehumanization. She even got a face back. And now, in the beginning of Dreamcatcher, we see this face in a close-up as she tells her story. The face is determined, proud and filled with a solid glow. "Today this young woman is standing in front of you," Brenda tells a school class and us viewers. "A woman with a face."
Brenda has made up for her incredible trauma comprehensible messages who can help others. She strikes back at the "anonymisation" she has been a victim of (by being treated as a commodity, an object), and helps to give a face to an otherwise opaque system of abuse and exploitation.

Observer Ende. The British documentary filmmaker Kim Longinotto has been with the student film since the 1970s Pride of Place (1976), resisted systematic repression. She is still best known for her work from the late 90s until today. Longinotto has often collaborated with other directors, such as when she and Ziba Mir-Hosseini made the sensational Divorce Iranian Style (1998). But in recent films she has directed alone (Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go, 2007; Rough Aunties, 2008; pink saris, 2010; Salma. Dreamcatcher is currently the latest in a series of shocking, award-winning documentaries from Longinotto, which highlights the faces of women who are fighting for a better life.

It makes sense when Longinotto says that she only picked up the camera and filmed when she "got goosebumps".

I Dreamcatcher she follows Brenda as she travels the streets of Chicago and talks about her experiences. On the street corners, she hands out condoms to prostitutes, and offers to help someone get away from the street; in prisons and schools, she talks about ruling techniques and the psychology of abuse, to equip young girls and women to defend themselves against pimps, abusers and a sense of shame and guilt that has no real reason to exist.
The film's title refers to a van called "The Dreamcatcher", which Brenda and others use in their work. Brenda's paid job is to talk to prostitutes in prison, but in her spare time she travels around schools and drives around the streets trying to pick up the prostitutes' dreams.
Brenda's strength as a "supervisor" lies precisely in her background; she herself has been in the shoes of those she helps, so she can and will not judge. As such, the film is reminiscent of Steve James' brilliant The Interrupters (2011). Here we follow former gang members in Chicago who now work for the organization Ceasefire. These people are trying to talk young people from killing each other. By intervening in environments of which they themselves have been a part, these "guardians" have a far greater respect among the gangs than the police and law enforcement enjoy; they provide practical advice where the police condemn and arrest. For example, there is one who tells a young boy not to take the life of another – not because it is morally wrong, but because it is foolish to end up in prison and ruin his own life. Ceasefire appears to be a "compromise" that works.
Longinotto's film not only bears similarities The Interrupters in how it portrays activists who find it crucial ethos and action in the self-perceived experience of the environment they intervene but also in their cinematic method. These films operate with an observational style in which the presence of the filmmakers is implied more than articulated; Longinotto is not visible in the picture, and she can almost never be heard, but we can notice her presence in close by to the people being filmed – both physically and emotionally. Brenda and those she talks to seem confident and genuine in front of the camera, who often observes two people in conversation.
It is in the presence of individual situations, and not as a holistic composition, that the film is at its best. It makes sense when Longinotto in an interview (with Eric Hynes for the Sundance Institute) says that she only recorded the camera and filmed when she "got goosebumps" (over 12 weeks she reportedly only collected 15 hours of material!). It is moment that burns in this film – moments that open up to unimaginable lives.

Victims of resilience. Some distance out in Dreamcatcher Brenda stands on a lectern and comments on a post from an ex-pimp named Homer. This ex-pimp used to live in the same environment as Brenda, and was a friend of her own pimp. Now he is helping her enlightenment project by telling young women about her cunning pimp strategies. Brenda points out the irony of the new balance of power: The ex-pimp works for the ex-prostitute.
As film historian Brian Winston has argued, there is a long tradition in documentaries of portraying people as victims. There can be a big discrepancy between a documentary filmmaker's portrait and a subject's self-experience, and an assigned victim role can be very problematic. IN Dreamcatcher this is actualized in an interesting way.

Brenda may be portrayed as a victim, but she is portrayed as a victim who has made the role of victim a constructive force.

Brenda may be portrayed as a victim, but she is portrayed as a victim who has made the role of victim a constructive force. She appears as a "heroic victim", who has overcome the abusers, if not herself as a victim (the traumas persist). Now she helps other victims – among other things by telling them that they er victims, and that they are not to blame for the abuses they have experienced.
«It's not your fault, »Brenda repeats again and again to the young women who have been through psychological as well as physical abuse. One of these experienced being raped in his own home as a small child. Ever since she was eleven years old, she says, she has made sure that her little sister has not been raped in the same home.
She is a victim, but one victim with resilience in the midst of exploitation and dehumanization. Dreamcatcher gives, in the midst of his observation of gruesome human destinies, a close portrait of this human ability to survive and use his own pain to help others. In this sense, the film is an educational as well as observational documentary, and uplifting as well as cruel.

Dreamcatcher can be streamed here .


Endre Eidsaa Larsen is a film critic in Ny Tid. endreeid@gmail.com.

endreeid@gmail.com
endreeid@gmail.com
Teaches film studies at NTNU Email endreeid@gmail.com

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