‘Dreamcatcher’: Bringing Kindness to the Conversation About Sex Work

Because Myers-Powell spent 25 years as a “prostitute” (she does not use the term “sex worker” or “sex work,” perhaps because the women we see don’t use these terms either) on the same streets where she now does outreach, she understands the complexity of these women’s lives. She tells one young woman (one of the few white women she encounters) on a deserted-looking stretch of road, “This is one of the most dangerous spots,” and that even though she liked to think of herself as tough back in the day she never would have been there at night.

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Written by Ren Jender.


“I used to be right out here too,” says Brenda Myers-Powell, the focus of the new documentary, Dreamcatcher (directed by Kim Loginotto, who won an award at the most recent Sundance for the film) as she and her coworker wind their vehicle through parts of their native Chicago that no tourist guide includes.

Over 20 years ago I was doing similar work to Myers-Powell’s, distributing condoms and talking with sex workers who worked the streets in my city. The emphasis at that job was safer sex education and HIV testing, but sometimes our clients needed more. One woman asked for and received a ride to detox (though we found out she left the next morning) and after we handed a scared-looking, visibly pregnant woman our condoms and information the driver did a U-turn and put a card for a treatment center (where our outreach van had its office) into her hand. Months afterward we saw that she had become one of the clients there.

When I hear debates about sex work and human trafficking these days I think of that woman and realize neither side would have done her much good. Some “empowered” sex workers would have thought her exploitation and drug addiction–along with the homelessness and violence she might have faced after leaving sex work, weren’t any of their concern. And worldwide efforts to stop “human trafficking” often assume no woman would willingly choose to do sex work; though people have no trouble understanding the difference in other kinds of human trafficking–a woman who works for wages as a maid and is free to quit is different from a maid who never receives her pay and is beaten if she tries to leave. They also ignore the danger law enforcement poses to sex workers themselves. Raids and arrests are, unsurprisingly, not very effective forms of outreach.

Because Myers-Powell spent 25 years as a “prostitute” (she does not use the term “sex worker” or “sex work,” perhaps because the women we see don’t use these terms either) on the same streets where she now does outreach, she understands the complexity of these women’s lives. She tells one young woman (one of the few white women she encounters) on a deserted-looking stretch of road, “This is one of the most dangerous spots,” and that even though she liked to think of herself as tough back in the day she never would have been there at night.

“That’s why I hardly ever come out here,” says the young woman, not entirely convincingly.

Myers-Powell asks her to have coffee, and we see the two, throughout the film, develop a relationship. When I saw Dreamcatcher at the opening night of the recent Athena Film Festival, Myers-Powell told the audience after the screening, “The first time I ask them: what do they want? And probably nobody has ever asked them that before.”

We see the cycle of sexual exploitation of some of these women starts in childhood. In a school-based “at-risk” group of girls that Myers-Powell facilitates, every girl in the room includes rape at an early age, often by someone in her own household, as part of her history, just as Myers-Powell does. When we see her speaking to another group she says, “I’m here to tell each and every one of you today,” and here her face softens, “it is not your fault.”

Myers-Powell has also worked to clear her own criminal record, as well as that of other women, successfully arguing that trafficking shouldn’t result in its survivors being charged with breaking the law. When she announces to the group that she no longer has a record she does a little dance in celebration.

Dreamcatcher is the foundation Myers-Powell’s co-founded; she told the audience at Athena that she started it in 2000, with no money, doing the outreach with her friend in a Ford Focus. Myers-Powell is glamorous (at one point she shows off her impressive wig collection), perceptive, and witty (at Athena she mentioned being directed to “‘social services,’ who are never very social”), but most striking is her unfailing kindness to the women and girls she encounters in the film, including parents we in the audience might judge more harshly. Even when she finds out one girl is making the mistake she herself has made, becoming pregnant at a very young age, Myers-Powell, without a wig or makeup, talking on the phone from her bedroom, is more resigned and sad than angry, but still not defeated.

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Brenda and the biological mother of her young son

 

When I worked in human services, many of the people who worked alongside me were, after their own troubled histories, trying to “give back,” but most of them couldn’t hide their frustration and disappointment with clients, like a mother who is hardest on the child who reminds her of herself at that age. Myers-Powell seems to bring none of this baggage to her work . When she speaks to an obviously impaired in-law (whose young son she is raising) and tells her how much she enjoys talking together when the woman is not high, she doesn’t have any edge in her voice. She means it.

In her remarks after the film, Myers-Powell said that she uses her experience to help others by asking herself, “What would’ve saved me?” She credited the people who had been kind to her when she was hospitalized (after a john beat her up and dragged her body from a car, scraping the skin off her face): “A lady doctor…would kick it with me every day. She said, ‘You’re funny. You’re smart. You’re beautiful,’ And I knew I wasn’t beautiful.”

When she got out of the hospital she went to Genesis House, of which she said, “It was a home…And I hadn’t had a home in years…I spent two years there and when I left I was a diva. I was ready for the world.” Now she’s trying to give others the same chance.

In a lot of ways the women and girls Myers-Powell does outreach to are the ones we, as a culture, pay the least attention to: they’re poor, often victims of abuse and usually Black or Latina. I couldn’t help noticing at the fancy, opening-night screening how many people around me, mostly men, tried to distract themselves from the women and girls in the film, either by talking loudly or, in one extreme case, showing a video on his phone to his seatmates, even after I told him more than once, through gritted teeth, to stop doing so. Let’s hope this film encourages others to not just look the other way.

Dreamcatcher will be on Showtime next Friday, March 27, 9 p.m. ET/PT and will be On Demand March 28 – May 22

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMPXhevhw0U” iv_load_policy=”3″]

 


Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender

The Athena Film Festival: Pushing the Conversation Forward

“We’ve been very lucky,” Silverstein says. “People have given their time to come in and share and teach, because we want to inspire people. The goal, really, is to just allow girls to dream and to believe that they could be directors and producers and writers, and for boys to see women can do this, too.” Silverstein hopes the message they take away is, “Everybody can be successful. It’s about talent. It shouldn’t be about your gender.”

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This is a guest post by Josh Ralske.

The Athena Film Festival has grown more ambitious with each passing year, and this year, its fifth, is no different. The festival’s co-founders, Kathryn Kolbert of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College, and Artistic Director Melissa Silverstein of Indiewire‘s Women and Hollywood, spoke with us about this year’s festival and the scant progress women filmmakers have made in Hollywood in recent years.

This year’s festival has gotten unprecedented media attention for its premiere of Dan Chaykin’s Rosie O’Donnell: A Heartfelt Stand Up and for Lifetime Achievement honoree Jodie Foster. The opening night film, Kim Longinotto’s Dreamcatcher, is a documentary about Brenda Myers-Powell, a former prostitute from Chicago who has turned her life around and devoted herself to helping other women and girls break free of the cycle of abuse and exploitation.

Rosie O’Donnell
Rosie O’Donnell

 

“Once I saw Dreamcatcher and I saw this amazing woman, Brenda, I just knew that it was our movie,” Silverstein tells me. “It’s just one of these stories of people that are doing amazing work in their communities that you would never see. We’re thrilled to be able to share the story at its New York premiere.”

“We’re looking for films that are inspiring and that can demonstrate positive social change in ways that demonstrate women’s agency, their ability to make a difference,” Kolbert explains, “and I think Dreamcatcher really fulfills all of those goals. It’s a particularly inspiring film, and one in which individual women have worked together to make a difference in the lives of women who have lived as prostitutes and wanted to come out of that world.”

Still from Dreamcatcher
Still from Dreamcatcher

 

Dreamcatcher‘s themes fit perfectly with the festival’s unique goals and mission. “We’re a unique festival in that we tell the stories of women in leadership roles,” Kolbert says. “We show films that are made by both men and women, as long as women are the protagonists of the story.”

As the festival’s main programmer, Silverstein works at finding a balance between “movies that have been overlooked,” and “great stuff that might have been playing at their multiplex that they missed.”

Co-Founders of the Athena Film Festival, Kathryn Kolbert and Melissa Silverstein
Co-Founders of the Athena Film Festival, Kathryn Kolbert and Melissa Silverstein

 

“What I try to do is curate a conversation,” she explains. “So I want to be able to have foreign movies, movies about women leaders in all different areas: in music, in science, in sports. It just shows the breadth and the depth of what women’s experiences are, and that’s what I try to do.”

While Silverstein is often frustrated by what studios will send to the small but steadily growing festival, sometimes she sees a film that she knows immediately they need to show. That was the case at the Berlinale last year, where she saw Athena’s Closing Night film, Difret, Ethiopian-born filmmaker Zeresenay Berhane Mehari’s drama of a teenage girl who responds violently when she’s abducted into marriage, and the bold young lawyer who takes her case. “The second I saw that movie, I knew that it had to play Athena,” Silverstein states, “and I have been like a rabid dog trying to get that movie.”

Difret
Difret

 

This year’s festival also includes some higher profile films, including the Centerpiece, Gina Prince-Bythewood’s underseen backstage drama, Beyond the Lights, featuring Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Minnie Driver, screening Saturday with the filmmaker, who’s receiving an award from the festival, in attendance. Filmmaker Gillian Robespierre will also be on hand for Satuday’s screening of her bluntly funny Obvious Child. The racially charged indie comedy Dear White People and Lukas Moodysson’s buoyant punk rock coming-of-age film We Are the Best! will also screen this weekend.

Then there’s actor-director-producer Foster’s well-deserved honor, the Laura Ziskin Lifetime Achievement Award. “Foster has been a quiet leader,” Silverstein says. “She’s been pushing the boundaries. She started to direct, as an actress before other actresses did that.” As an actor, Foster’s career highlights expanded Hollywood’s vision of the type of roles women could play. “The roles that she won the Academy Award for … The Accused was about gang rape, and that was in the late ’80s. That wasn’t a subject matter that was discussed at that time, and she really took that on,” Silverstein points out, “and then with Silence of the Lambs, she was really ahead of the curve. I think that’s what the Athena Film Festival wants to be, and Jodie embodies that.”

Beyond the Lights
Beyond the Lights

 

As a director, Foster hasn’t made a feature since 2011’s The Beaver, starring her embattled friend Mel Gibson. Like many talented women directors, she’s turned to the small screen, directing episodes of Netflix’s House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. She has a new feature in pre-production, Money Monster, starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts.

I asked both Kolbert and Silverstein if 2015’s successful films directed by women, including Obvious Child, Ava DuVernay’s Selma, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, and Amma Asante’s Belle, which opened the festival last year, offer cause for optimism. I pointed out that Michelle MacLaren had been hired to direct the upcoming DC Comics adaptation of Wonder Woman for Warner Bros., based on the strength of her television work, including several outstanding episodes of Breaking Bad. Neither was particularly sanguine about what these milestones mean for women in Hollywood as a whole.

Jodie Foster
Jodie Foster

 

“In the film industry, I don’t see a lot of progress,” Kolbert states, “except for the fact that now the paucity of women in film has become an issue that’s discussed.”

“The numbers have been really static for the last decade,” Silverstein points out. “We did a survey at Women and Hollywood from 2009 to 2013, and 5 percent of all the studio films were directed by women and only 10 percent of the indie films were directed by women.” She doesn’t mince words about the backward attitude those numbers reflect. “That’s just abysmal. We’re half the world. And we don’t get the opportunities. It’s not a lack of talent; it’s a lack of opportunities.”

Gina Prince-Bythewood
Gina Prince-Bythewood

 

Silverstein agrees with Kolbert that at least people are talking about the issues involved, as in the Academy’s recent snub of DuVernay, which Kolbert bluntly calls “a travesty.” As Silverstein sees it, “The progress has been in this robust, wonderful, inquisitive, and actually angry conversation about the lack of opportunities for women. I will be very happy when the numbers move to where the conversation is.”

The Athena Film Festival is playing a part in moving things along. That’s why it also includes a practical element, with Seed & Spark’s Emily Best giving a workshop on crowdfunding, and industry leaders Prince-Bythewood, Cathy Schulman, and Stephanie Laing providing Master Classes in their respective fields. “We’ve been very lucky,” Silverstein says. “People have given their time to come in and share and teach, because we want to inspire people. The goal, really, is to just allow girls to dream and to believe that they could be directors and producers and writers, and for boys to see women can do this, too.” Silverstein hopes the message they take away is, “Everybody can be successful. It’s about talent. It shouldn’t be about your gender.”

Kolbert makes a similar point. “My goal for the festival is that over the long term, when you think of leadership, you’re going to picture women,” she says, rejecting the traditional image of “a white guy with a little gray hair at his temples.” She sums up the Athena Film Festival’s mission nicely, quoting Marian Wright Edelman: “You can’t be what you can’t see.”

 


Josh Ralske is a freelance film writer based in New York. He has written for MovieMaker Magazine and All Movie Guide.