Love & Diane

A film by Jennifer Dworkin

2002 | 155 minutes | Color | 35mm/DVD | Order No. 03814

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SYNOPSIS

Jennifer Dworkin’s groundbreaking documentary LOVE & DIANE presents a searingly honest and moving examination of poverty, welfare and drug rehabilitation in the United States today. Filmed in New York City over a five-year period, Dworkin documents the struggles of three generations of the Hazzard family as they face a myriad of emotional, financial and personal challenges.

LOVE & DIANE is at its heart a highly charged story about a mother and daughter searching for love, redemption and hope for a new future. While caught in a devastating cycle of teen pregnancy and the bureaucracy of an over burdened welfare system, they demonstrate an inspiring resiliency and ability to find strength during the most desperate times. Without falling into stereotypes of welfare and poverty, LOVE & DIANE casts a fair, non-judgmental eye on the Hazzard’s and presents a forgotten, but very real, side of the American experience.

This film is a presentation of the Independent Television Service (ITVS) with funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).

PRESS

"This epic documentary is destined to become one of the touchstones of American nonfiction cinema."

New York Film Festival

" Love and Diane is sheer exhilaration, a movie of awesome emotional power and devastating social relevance...such a richly humanizing experience. It is vital, necessary film that deserves the widest possible audience"

Nathan Lee The Sun, NY

"...tremendous emotional force and uncompromising honesty…Dworkin brilliantly uses …form to involve the viewer in a warts-and-all complexity that confounds facile judgment, while creating the frustrating slowness of a system of social services that often nurtures the very ill it attempts to cure"

Ronnie Scheib Variety

" Jennifer Dworkin's compelling documentary immerses you so intensely in the problems of the Hazzards...that by the end of its two and a half hours you feel almost like a member of the household."

Stephen Holden The New York Times

"Forget about The Bachelor, Fear Factor and Survivor. Love & Diane is the real deal in reality TV. Shot over ten years by first-time filmmaker Jennifer Dworkin, the PBS ...illustrates the seismic effects of addiction, poverty, abandonment and often-abusive foster care."

Akiba J. Solomon Essence

SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

  • Cinema Du Reel Film Festival
  • Get Reel Black Film Festival
  • Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
  • Locarno International Film Festival - Golden Leopard
  • The New York Film Festival
  • PRISM Award Nominee
  • One World International Film Festival - Best Documentary
  • Independent Spirit Award - DirectTV/IFC Truer Than Fiction Award
  • Film de Femmes International Film Festival
  • San Francisco International Film Festival
  • IDFA, International Documentarty Film Festival Amsterdam
  • Boston Women's Film Festival
  • Cleveland International Film Festival
  • Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival
  • Nashville Independent Film Festival
  • Dallas Video Festival
  • Sundance Film Festival

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Jennifer Dworkin

LOVE & DIANE is Jennifer Dworkin’s first film. Jennifer was born in New York but grew up in England, returning to the United States for college. She has an MA and is pursuing a PhD in Philosophy at Cornell University but is currently on leave. Her research was on the subject of conscious access and self-knowledge. She is the recipient of several research fellowships and was awarded the 1997 Fellowship for Excellence in Research and Academic Promise in the Cognitive Sciences from Cornell University. Jennifer Dworkin has known some members of the family portrayed in LOVE & DIANE since 1989, when she taught photography workshops for children in NYC Tier II shelter system. These workshops grew into a program teaching kids still photography and filmmaking with Super 8 cameras. She has worked extensively as a volunteer and group leader for several children’s charities. Jennifer learned filmmaking in the course of making this documentary (over many years). (09/09)

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