An Interview with Filmmaker Emily Abt

Three years ago, Emily Abt was a welfare caseworker in New York City, planning to go to law school and become, perhaps, a family court judge. The 26-year-old Abt is now a documentary filmmaker whose debut film aired for the first time Tuesday July 24, 2001 on PBS.

Take it From Me follows four families as they navigate the public assistance system and the obstacles in their lives. Framed by New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's press appearances praising the success of the city's welfare-to-work system, the film lets four women explain, in their own words, the everyday realities of welfare reform's work-first approach. As movie's tagline proclaims, welfare is only part of the story.

At the start of the film we meet Abby, a 19-year-old mother of two who has been denied public assistance six times. She needs welfare to get her own apartment in order to reunite with her two young children, who are in foster care. Iyoka and Louie, 24 and 25, have been on assistance for a year, after a fire destroyed their house, and are struggling to find stable employment and keep their family together. Valentina is 45, and has spent the last 28 years raising her children on public assistance, and battling drug abuse and alcoholism. Clean for 9 years, her primary struggle now is succeeding as a single mother on a $5.50 an hour wage. Teresa, 43, has been on assistance for three years. She and her 19-year-old son Simon, who shows signs of undiagnosed mental illness, live on a $109.00 weekly welfare subsidy and rental assistance.

We spoke with Emily Abt on Monday, July 16, 2000.

Can you tell me a little bit about the background? How did you get the idea for this project?

What happened was I was a caseworker and I was on this whole do-gooder trajectory. I had done a lot of government-related internships in college and I was a poli-sci major, I wrote my thesis on welfare policy...It was a natural step to become a caseworker after college... I saw how [my clients] were being treated coldly by the system.

I felt like the story really wasn't getting out, that what my clients were dealing with wasn't being communicated or conveyed in any kind of compelling format.

I think if done well, film is the great communicator. Art...has this ability to widen people's circle of compassion and broaden people's sense of community.

Once you got the idea, how then did you begin to work on it? Did you have filmmaking skills?

I had no film experience, but I had this burgeoning idea. Then I had the good fortune of working on [the motion picture] Boys Don't Cry. I was the extras coordinator...That gave me some exposure to the filmmaking process. [After that,] I worked at a social issues documentary company called Big Mouth Productions. At night, I'd do interviews on behalf of my own project.

Basically nobody told me to go ahead with it, they were like, "You're crazy, you're 23, you have no idea what you're doing."

To fund the film, Abt applied for grants and hosted two screening parties as fundraisers.

What was it about these four women that led you to choose them?

I was a caseworker in a business that placed welfare recipients in jobs, called America Works. I met Valentina and tried to get her a job. She was difficult to place because, like a lot of former welfare recipients she has basically an eighth grade educational background ? Then, with Iyoka, I got her a job. It was a service job at a bagel shop that hired her for a few months right around Christmas but then laid her off, which was typical. That happens a lot with service jobs.

I felt connected to them and wanted to do better by them. The film, in a way, was sort of a gift to them, more than I could do as a social worker.

It was very difficult to get a white woman to be in the film because in New York City, they're only about 5 percent of the caseload. It was important to me because of racialized images of people on welfare? Teresa actually came to me, she was excited to share her story.

I met Abby through Jen Ferre, who you see in the film. Jen is my old college roommate, a fellow caseworker. She told me about Abby's story and I said, okay, I have to meet this girl.

Was housing the reason Abby's children were removed from her custody?

It's a very complicated story....

I had a hard time honing it down in the film. Her parents had a case open with the Administration for Children's Services (ACS) because of some reports of child abuse between them and Abby's brother. When Abby had her second child, Anthony, there were a bunch of red flags for the hospital caseworker, because Abby was a very young mother, she's very poor, she already had another child, and this newest child was born with cerebral palsy. The caseworker looked into where Abby was living and saw that there was a case open, so she said this child could not be released to stay at this home.

Abby went into the shelter system with her son Edwin and her newborn, Anthony?One weekend she and her kids went home to visit Abby's mother...The caseworker happened to come to the shelter to visit Abby at that time, and said that because Abby had left the premises [without proper permission], her children were going to be removed. Abby fled with the children and went to Providence, which was a bad decision. [She] came back, went to criminal court, was arrested and the children were put in foster care and she's been fighting to get them back for two years now.

Abby just received a Section 8 housing subsidy and an apartment this month.

I'm definitely of a sort of liberal persuasion, but I think a mistake that a lot of liberals make is that they try to deny the harsh reality of many welfare recipients. There's an emphasis on trying to make them seem ... as deserving as possible, sort of victims in a sense. And I think the truth is really much more nuanced. I think that Abby has made some big mistakes, you know... but I don't think that her family should be torn apart and her children should suffer because she didn't finish high school and go to college and get a good job before she had children.

Were you surprised at the obstacles and challenges the women in the film faced, or were they familiar because you were a caseworker?

I think the prevalence and degree to which I heard domestic violence-related stories was shocking. Every woman was either dealing with or had dealt with some kind of abuse.

When I did these long interviews [it was clear] this population on the whole is very depressed. [This may be] part of the reason there's a misconception of recipients as lazy. Upper-class people can get on Prozac. Depression keeps people poor and it's a circular thing. It's almost criminal that we don't look at that problem.

What needs to change to help parents like Abby and others who are working but unable to make ends meet or pay rent?

Most people who were [transitioning from welfare to work] were moving into service jobs and that's hard. We've got to raise the minimum wage, so people can live off service-related jobs. We need better child care subsidies... I'm seeing good things with health care in New York, you see ads about free health care for kids, and I hope it continues to expand and be more available.

We've got to make public education better and for moms, too, so they can improve career options. Valentina is so smart, she's such a survivor—she has a lot to offer in terms of [giving] counseling or becoming a motivational speaker. She doesn't have the education or credentials to do that and has to support her kids, so she takes on pot-washer jobs, with little time to pursue education

We also need mental health services, to deal with depression and its debilitating effects.

The stories provide a full look at the obstacles and struggles parents on TANF in NYC face as they work to stay above poverty. What was it like to select the pieces to put into the film? Was it difficult to choose, and what criteria did you use?

We had over 100 hours of film. ? You've got all the pieces and first you just go through your footage and pick out the themes you find most compelling. Our first cut was nine hours long...From there you just kind of hone in on each person's storyline and how you can make them inter-cut.

A lot of people who make documentaries try to sugarcoat the process and they say the subjects are so excited. It wasn't like that for me because these women were in various stages of crises a lot of times and it was a very awkward thing for me and them both, to say, okay, I know you're dealing with all this extreme hardship but let me stick a camera in your face and just make it that much more difficult.

Welfare reform people tend to feel strongly one way or another, that either [circumstances are horrible] or it's personal responsibility. I felt comfortable that the truth is not black or white but gray... I didn't want to make a puff piece on behalf of welfare recipients. The women come off as very human and strong sometimes, but also flawed. They're not victims.

Take it From Me aired at 10 p.m. ET this Tuesday on PBS and will be rebroadcast (times may vary by region). For a schedule, and more information on this and other PBS POV films, visit the POV site. Emily Abt's Pureland Pictures Web site has more pictures and stories from the film, including bios of the participants and creators. For more coverage and links to resources on this topic, visit the Connect for Kids poverty and welfare reform topic pages.

Caitlin Johnson is staff writer at Connect for Kids.