Customer Reviews

Down and Out in America [VHS]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Down and Out in America

"It's a war.
There's no blood,
but there will be."

These ominous words set the tone for this Academy Award-winning definitive program on America's discarded people---the homeless.

Down and Out in America takes a hard look at suffering farmers in debt who can't hold on to their land,
the poor who fill the shelters and then are thrown out,
and the 20 million Americans who still don't have enough to eat.

This intensely disturbing expose brings the nightmare of poverty to your doorstep,
giving you another look at this land of opportunity."

DOWN AND OUT IN AMERICA
ACADEMY AWARD WINNER
BEST DOCUMENTARY, 1986.
[from the back cover of Video case]

Actress/director Lee Grant produced, directed and narrated this Academy Award documentary in 1985. It's a sobering look at the nouveaux-pauvres of the 1980s in both urban and rural America. Much attention is given to the Mid-Western farm crisis of the era and the dislocation that engendered. There is also a good deal of focus on emerging "welfare hotel industry" of the era.

Since the focus is on individuals and their stories, the movie comes off as less of a criticism of the policies of any one administration (although this IS the Eighties, we're talking about) and more of portrait of people dealing with crises brought on, for the most part, by social and historical forces beyond their control. Twenty four years later, you can't help wonder what became of these people. Did the struggling farmers manage to keep their farms? Did they migrate to the cities--for good or for ill. And what about the young couple in the New York, burned out of their home and living in two rooms in a crumbling welfare hotel? Their three children would now be about the ages they were in the film. What has life brought them?

Food for thought from an economic downturn a quarter of a century ago. It's only getting grimmer out there, folks.