Love And Diane

Jennifer and Love and Diane

     Old Yiddish proverb - Mann trakht und Gott lakht. Man plans, God laughs.
     Diane Hazzard didn't plan on becoming a crack addict, on losing her six children to the byzantine bureaucracy of New York City's foster care system, or on getting them back several years later. Jennifer Dworkin didn't plan on spending nearly eight years of her life documenting Diane's struggles with rebuilding her family and trying to find a career that would allow her to keep them together.
     But that's what happened, and the resulting documentary, Love and Diane, is remarkably even-handed, stunningly intelligent and moving but refreshingly unsentimental, in impressive debut for Dworkin.
     "I had no background in documentary," Dworkin said in a phone interview last week. " I did go to film school, but what I did mostly was production design. I never worked on a documentary, never worked on a video."
     How radical a departure was documentary film? Dworkin notes sheepishly, "I hadn't even seen other documentaries, which was ridiculous in retrospect. [Working on this film] was definitely learning on the job."
     Dworkin didn't expect that "the job" would be directing a feature documentary; she started out working with homeless kids in an after-school program of her own creation, teaching them photography with donated cameras and darkroom time. Eventually the program moved into Super 8 and the kids began documenting their lives in the shelter system. She was intrigued by a young man who turned out to be Diane's brother, and the three children he was bringing to the program, the children of her sister. When one of them moved in with Diane it led Dworkin to her and the family she was trying to put back together.

          Love Hinson and her mother, Diane Hazzard                                           Jennifer Dworkin

     Diane's situation at the outset of the film is simple but harrowing. She has been given custody of her children once more and the family is going through the painful process of learning to live together, albeit in dire financial straits. At the heart of their trauma is Love, 18, a young woman who is more like her mother than either of them wants to admit, HIV+ and the mother of an infant, Donyaeh.
     Dworkin spent five years filming the family, watching them split apart and re-unite, moving from one apartment to another in various permutations, mostly in response to the often bizarre regulations of city agencies. Like her mother, Love loses her child to the foster care system but in a protracted court struggle is finally able to bring him home once more.
Love and Diane recounts these events with a warmth that bespeaks the filmmaker's deeply felt concern, yet the film is dispassionate enough to allow us to see the human failings of its subjects.
     "I know enough about documentary-making to know that some people thought you need to retain distance and not interact with [your subjects] on a personal level," Dworkin says. "But I didn't see the point to that. It's artificial. You can't observe people without your presence affecting what happens"
     Moreover, she notes, Love and Diane is "not a verité film, it's a film with verité scenes."
She explains, "There are many scenes where people are talking directly to me. And it's very manipulated, you hear what purports to be people's thoughts and the film goes in and out of the past."
     "What I wanted to do with the film was to try and convey as realistically as possible the experience of living the life that Love and Diane were living. And I thought the way to do that was to immerse myself in what their lives were like. I did become friends with them and I thought that was essential. It wouldn't be for many other films."
     Even so, she says, she retained some degree of objectivity.
"In certain areas, I was objective, around the issues about Donyaeh's return home mainly," she says. "I wasn't wholeheartedly on anybody's side."
     Love, for one, was fully cognizant of Dworkin's attitude.
     "She doesn't expect me to be uncritically on her side," Dworkin says. "She knows I have certain inflexible views on certain things. I'm prone to lecture her on them, given the chance. Of course, Love never takes my advice."


For information on where Love and Diane is currently playing, go to www.wmm.com/loveanddiane.

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