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TROOP
1500
Director's statement
on Troop 1500
by Ellen Spiro
Karen Bernstein and I volunteered with the Lone Star Council's Girl Scout
Beyond Bars program, for a few years before shooting. With a grant from
Humanities Texas and the Independent Television Service (ITVS), we trained
the girls in media production. The girls then made their own films and when
documentary production began for Troop 1500, they had a better
understanding of the documentary process.
After an extensive process of getting permissions from Girl Scouts of the
USA and the Texas Criminal Justice System, I asked the girls to interview
their own mothers. The idea came up quite spontaneously one day while traveling
to the prison in a van with the girls. The so-called "girl-mom" interviews told the deeper story of their fragile relationships beautifully.
The girls used the opportunity and the formality of the interview set-up
to ask their moms questions they had never asked them before. The camera
became a witness, ally and a friend to them, something to help them get
at the truth of their situations. The girl-mom interviews reveal conflicted
emotions of love and abandonment and the ultimate realization that the girls
will have to create their own futures, with or without their mother's guidance
and support.
Statistically, these girls are six times more likely to wind up in jail
than other kids. So, the ultimate goal of the troop is to help them grow
strong enough to fight the pressures that might land them in prison some
day. Although the "girl-mom" interviews are only a small part
of the larger film, it inspired me to continue shooting the story, because
I could see how the girls were growing stronger with the process of being
in the documentary as both subjects and crew.
We went to the prison and showed the fine cut to the mothers. Most of the
mothers' issues with the film had to do with their close-ups and we could
not change that! But one mother did accuse us of making her out to "look
like a big time dope dealer" to which one of the other mothers responded
"but you ARE a big time dope dealer!" So, it was a difficult ethical
balancing act: not letting our close, personal relationships with the moms
get in the way of an honest depiction of their lives.
TROOP 1500 is filled with deep, complicated and disturbing
realities, but TROOP 1500 is also about LOVE. In spite of
the disappointment, feelings of abandonment and betrayal, these girls REALLY
LOVE their moms. They understand, on some deep level, the complexities of
why their moms are in prison usually due to mistakes their moms made that
were about their own over-powering addictions, not about their lack of love
for their daughters.
Most of the women are there for addiction-related crimes and addiction is
a mental illness, something that over-powers better judgment for the sake
of a chemical and psychological need. The back story of this film has to
do with a lack of treatment for addiction and mental illness. It is an untreated
within prisons, and many women return to prison after being released, though
the Girl Scout program provides treatment and therapy. If these women could
have gotten treatment early in their lives, they might not have landed in
prison and their families might have stayed together and their children
might have been spared the suffering.
You see the reactions of the guards in the film, mostly non-verbal ones
since it is against prison rules for the guard to interact with the inmates.
Though their job is to be detached, you can see that when they are watching
the mother-daughter interactions that they are emotionally transfixed, as
much so as any of us who witness the re-uniting and then the heart-breaking
separation at the end of the day between mother and daughter.
Entering a prison, even as an adult, even for the 20th time, is a bit terrifying.
You are walking into a different society and culture where everything is
topsy-turvy. Our rules do NOT apply. Questioning authority is not allowed.
When I am not making films, I teach in a University where questioning is
the rule, not the exception. At the prison, I had to remember to ask permission
to go the bathroom. So, you can only imagine how it feels for the girls.
This film is finished, finally, but in some ways it is just the beginning
of our friendships with the girls and their moms. They will always be a
really important part of our lives.
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