- Courtesy Anne de Mare
- “It’s an enormous thing to be trusted with someone’s story,” says documentarian Anne de Mare.
Did you know? Chicago Public Schools classifies about 19,000 of its students as homeless. CPS has appointed two employees per school—teachers, secretaries, even principals—as “homeless liaisons” responsible for keeping an eye on these kids and helping them survive. In August, during a half-day seminar for its 1,200 homeless liaisons, CPS showed them scenes and outtakes from a new documentary, The Homestretch, about homeless teenagers in Chicago.
But I don’t think both my wife and I could have forgotten that the last night of the Crib was going to show up in a movie. (Or, more precisely, the last night of that chapter of the Crib—it’s since received city funding and reopened.) Hand-held cameras aren’t obtrusive, but they’re not invisible either.
“It’s easier for a camera to disappear in a moment of emotion,” de Mare said. “It was just me with a hand-held camera and trying to be in the space but be a fly on the wall.”
She went on, “I think this is why long-form documentary is so terribly important as a medium, and it’s something not a lot of people talk about. When a camera comes in and out of a person’s life quickly, that’s one relationship, but when you spend a number of years with a subject, the camera really does fall away, and the relationship with the filmmaker becomes stronger than the presence of the camera.
“Ultimately, you hope the substance and value of the film transcends the emotions that both the subjects and the filmmakers had when making it.”
