Helping Amy (2021)
Narrative short film
A chance encounter begins a relationship between Amy, a pregnant unhoused teenager and Marla. After Amy gives birth, she tests positive for drugs. Marla steps in to manage the situation. She sequesters Amy and monitors her until she can be tested again. Without her newborn, Amy begins to unravel, trapped in a room; depending on a woman she barely knows who holds her future in her hands.
Director statement and potential spoilers below.
Featuring Belissa Escobedo, Liza Kate, Sapna Gandhi
Score by Brandon Evans.
Director's Statement (Spoilers)
After having my own child and facing issues after childbirth, I wanted to explore the fates of those with few options, without a support structure, and without access to care.
The film is my emotional response to our structural problems, failed social systems, and hypocrisy towards new mothers. It is an exploration of the power structures who exploit human needs, hope, and faith.
In my research, I also began reading about Georgia Tann, a child trafficker who, under the guise of running children's’ adoption homes, was stealing children from vulnerable and destitute families, adopting (selling) them to other families, and destroying their records so they could not find their birth families. She is also credited with popularizing adoption in the United States and advocated for sealing birth records, which many states continue to mandate today.
I see this happening again, with families being separated and children being placed in foster care, and adopted away from biological parents with no recourse or information about their children’s whereabouts. How did we get here?
I shot this film in late summer 2018, and life and then covid got in the way. I recut the film in 2020. The structural and economic inequities and divides that initially informed this work have become more acute in the years since. I could ask the question, how did we get here, but we all know how.
My work often focuses on desire, needs, and the human condition. This film points at some evil realities in today’s American society.