A MULTITUDE OF BRUSHES IS NEEDED TO PAINT A CANVAS OF SOLUTION
A few minutes after Little Amal left Gladys/General Jeff Park in Skid Row, Crushow Herring, Skid Row Artist and Organizer, came by and introduced me to a young actress and filmmaker from Brazil named Gabi Spaciari.
We chatted for a minute and exchanged contact information. She said she wanted to make a documentary about homelessness in L.A. I studied her website and her work, mostly in Brazil, showed her talent and skill. She’s made two short films - one fiction and one documentary. She’s lived in Los Angeles off and on for the past eight years.
We got together at MADE, the social enterprise Coffee Shop of the Downtown Women’s Center in mid-November, and talked for over an hour. She said she’s been in research mode for two years around homelessness in L.A. to make her first feature length documentary. She began by thinking she would do a film about youth homelessness since she had done a short film about street kids in Brazil. But now she’s looking to focus on Skid Row.
While I respected her talent and skill, the main thing I walked away with after an hour is her depth of sincerity. I told her about some of the exploitive experiences with media Skid Row folks have experienced and how important transparency/accountability will be as she walks this out.
She told me the name of the documentary is Mom Street. I told her Crushow talks about Skid Row as a mother. That brought a very big smile to her face.
She told me the journey the film will take the audience on is Trauma to Healing.
Since then, she’s brought me on board as a co-writer. We’ve been reaching out to some Skid Row folks/nonprofit orgs to talk about the project and build relationships.
She’s created a blog at her company, Tres Marias Films, to document this process as a form of transparency/accountability.
MOM STREET | Tres Marias Films
This process is alot of work. It’s also alot of fun.
Here is a Lorinda Hawkins Smith selfie from one of the fun moments — Gabi came to the Urban Voices Project Christmas Crawl on Christmas Day and with her was Mark Lecky, her Director of Photography.
