The husband and wife team behind the Oscar-nominated and Sundance award-winning STREETWISE returns to that film’s most unforgettable subject.
In July 1983, renowned photojournalist Mary Ellen Mark and writer Cheryl McCall told the story of the lives of Seattle’s street kids in LIFE magazine. Affected by the teens they met, including 13-year-old prostitute Tiny, the duo returned later that year with director Martin Bell, Mark’s husband, to create a documentary film about nine youths they met. Released theatrically, STREETWISE also screened in competition at Sundance in 1985, where it won a special jury prize, and was later nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar. In the decades that followed, Mark and Bell have maintained a relationship with Tiny, filming her as she struggled with drugs and poverty and became a mother several times over. Over the next year, the filmmakers will return to Seattle to capture Tiny and her family today, using the footage from the past 30 years to supplement the story.
With one week left in their Kickstarter campaign, Mark and Bell have already hit their initial target of $60,000, but now hope to reach a new stretch goal of $85,000 to allow them to provide follow-ups to other subjects from the original documentary. To keep updated, visit Mark’s website.
Longitudinal studies in film offer the viewer the unique opportunity to see individuals change over time. Audiences who are familiar with the original documentary have already gotten a sense of Erin Blackwell AKA Tiny at a particular moment in her life, and she left a stark impression about the harsh reality of life on the streets in the early 1980s. There’s a natural curiosity about what happens to doc subjects after the cameras stop rolling, and Mark and Bell’s relationship with Tiny affords a chance to find out, and to observe the limits poverty placed on her, and the consequences of her actions, in the intervening years.
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