Jacksonville Film Festival presents... "My Mother's Garden"

A Special Screening:
Jacksonville Public Library

Sunday May 18th, at 3:15pm.

If you're in Florida and yr a fan, would love to see you there!

far away in a new world, the feelings of loss and despair hit home. I understand her pain, the inability to do anything, unpack, clean, shower. Emotional bondage to something or someone who refuses or cant love you back is the worst pain in the world. trying to get over the hump, just pushing forward but nothing makes any sense anymore, with out the key to it all, love. trying to love myself right now but i feel empty. i know im making progress and i will be okay but when?

stay tuned for HOT DOCS updates.

Hot Docs presents…" My Mother’s Garden"

Screening Times:
Mon. 4/21/2008 - 9:15 PM @ AL GREEN theatre
Wed. 4/23/2008 - 1:30 PM @ Alliance Cumberland Cinemas

Visit our website: www.mymothersgardenmovie.com
Or our blog @ www.myspace.com/mymothersgarden
Contact: Cynthia Lester- (917) 648-9767
http://www.hotdocs.ca

Sorry its taken me so long to update you all after the truly wonderful experience I had screening "My Mother’s Garden" at the True/False Film Fest. I made so many friends and strong connections with the people of Missouri, I want to move there! Thanks so much for reaching out and giving the film such a warm acceptance. I am glad you were able to relate to the film and get to know my mom and my family.

Much Love,
Cynthia

p.s. Off to HotDocs next! hope it gets the same kind of attention there as well...feel free to keep in touch and send us a note! XOXO

this is very well written...
My Mother's Garden
Written by Dawn Sarnecky
Saturday, 26 January 2008

Film: My Mother's Garden
Written and Directed by: Cynthia Lester
Category: Documentary

One man's trash is another man's treasure is an underlying theme in this film. The documentary, "My Mother's Garden," takes a sometimes painfully close look into the lives of a sister and her two brothers who are affected by their mother's disease of compulsive hoarding. This documentary was particularly easy to relate to because this disease is in the beginning stages with several members of my extended family. Hoarding disease in my family may not exist today to the extreme that Eugenia Lester and her family experienced it, but I can see where it starts and how, after viewing this film, it can end.

Eugenia Lester grew up in post-war Poland depression with nothing to her name (along with the rest of the people in her country). Her father and mother abandoned her at a very young age, which alone can cause a child to have severe mental health issues in latter years. Her aunt, an Auschwitz survivor, took on the sole responsibility to care for her. Eventually Eugenia was able to immigrate to New York City.

I believe in order to comprehend the complexity of this film one must first understand the disease itself. Hoarding disorder is when the mind lacks the capability to throw away or discard any item. Those individuals whom have this disease feel if they discard something, they are discarding a part of themselves. In the case of Eugenia Lester, her traumatic childhood and growing up in post-war Poland were major contributing factors to the disease. If one grows up with nothing and is forced to live in unimaginable conditions as humanly possible, the mind automatically goes into defense mode and takes over with feelings of anguish and disgust because they have already been through the worst of the worst. The human psyche tries to replace those feelings and sees value in everything, even though it may have lost value to someone else.

It is a vicious circle and hard to break. Eugenia's daughter, Cynthia, took her to New York while her three brothers gutted the house from top to bottom to try and make it look like a house again or the city was going to take it from her. Even while Eugenia spent time with her daughter in New York, she would still hoard things in her room. When she returned to her California home and found all of her possessions had been thrown away, she went through severe depression and withdrew herself from society, even more so now that all of her possessions were gone. Eugenia finally moved into a nursing home and found purpose again. I also think because she was no longer able to nurture her children and they had long since moved away, she was able to find new purpose in taking care of those who were not able to take care of themselves.

Moving someone with hoarding disease can be very traumatic, even pushing the person to unhealthy emotional realms and actions. It is best to have a mental health team involved in decisions and treatment.

I think this film takes a fresh and vivid approach to a disease which over 2 million Americans suffer from, but yet there is a seeming lack of awareness about information and research about this disease. How can you solve a problem or begin to tackle it if you do not know it exists? On the other hand, maybe those that recognize it have chosen to ignore it and let those that have the disease go on living their lives because they don't have the hope and faith that they might be able to change. In my experience it's the latter of the two.

The Children of Hoarders website is a wealth of information and support resources for hoarders and their families. The OCF, or Obsessive Compulsive Foundation is also a great resource.

I personally enjoyed this film and I have since become fascinated with learning more about hoarding disease. It would be interesting to see documentation of Eugenia's progress in three, six or nine months. I believe Cynthia Lester is extremely brave in letting her audience have such an intimate look into her personal life and family. She is an up and coming director whose first film certainly leaves me wanting more, and eager to experience her next effort.

Look! how exciting..

http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/blog/2008/01/slamdance-director-interview-cynthia.php

Interview by Brandon Harris

As Sundance begins this weekend, the world of independent cinema once again turns its attention to this snowy resort town thirty miles outside of Salt Lake. Yet, since 1995, Sundance hasn't been the only act in town. The 2008 Slamdance Film Festival begins today at Park City's Treasure Mountain Inn, opening with Randall Cole's Real Time, a brisk indie comedy starring Randy Quaid. As a brief snapshot of some of the 29 features and 67 shorts that Slamdance will screen in the next nine days, I caught up with thirteen Slamdance Filmmakers to discuss their films with us.


The story of Eugenia Lester, a woman afflicted with hoarding disorder, and her three children, who struggle with the devastating consequences of her disease. Born in Poland in 1944 and raised in an austere communist society by an Auschwitz survivor, she moved to the consumer driven disposable society of America in 1974 and was overwhelmed by a culture of excess.

Where were you when you heard you were accepted to Slamdance and how did it make you feel?
I was at work, I work full time at a crisis center, G.E.M.S, www.gems-girls.org which helps girls on the street get a better change at life, so I had to run outside and scream, YES! Thank you! It really is a dream come true, I first came to Slamdance/Sundance when I was a teenager, I went to a performing arts school in the center of Pacoima. I think it was a program designed to help kids stay in school, we sold candy bars to pay for our trip. And now I have come full circle, I'm living the dream. Now, I know it taks a whole lifetime of hard work to get here. I can't believe I'm actually at this point in my life. It wasn't an easy road but I just had to keep thinking to myself you have to finish this film, and now we're here!

When and why did it first occur to you to make a film about your mother's illness?
I've always been trying to understand my mom. I first started making films about her in college, so this is kind of a continuation of that. I didn't realize the house had gotten that bad after I moved to NY. I kept wondering how we were going to help her and I would become paralyzed by fear of the unimaginable task in front of us. Finally my brothers and I sat down and said we have to do something now before the city comes in to take her house away. That's when I decided I would document the process as sort of a way to help me deal with the situation and create some sort of separation between the emotional toll this would take on me as a daughter and the responsibility I had as a caretaker to help her out of this. The first was to work together and figure out how we were going to get my mom to part with her "precious treasures" she had been collecting, making the film took a back seat sometimes, but I was able to put together a story that shows you a significant time in our life.

Did you initially see it a means to heal some of the wounds leftover from the childhood the film describes?
I guess so, I wanted so bad to have a relationship with my mother and sometimes having the camera there reminded us to be civil with one another and take a step back and observe how we are treating each other, sometimes it helped us move past our own hang-ups to really observe how the other person is feeling in the situation. I think I have healed because I don't think I could be happy living my life knowing that someone in my family is suffering and this film gave me a chance to devote the last three years of my life to searching for answers that could hopefully create a better situation for my mom which in turn put me at ease. I don't think I will ever get back the fact that my childhood wasn't the best but I know that I have a strong family and even though we were poor and had a lot of difficult situations to get through which put strain on our relationships, it doesn't mean that we can't be a source of strength for other families. I always looked up to the "perfect" families next door, but from making this film, I guess I learned the true meaning of family. Even with my mother's illness, she is someone I can talk to and she won't judge me.

Has your mother seen the film? How does she feel about it?
Yes, my mother has been a part of the filmmaking process. She even started directing me what to shoot and what story to tell after a while, ha! Which I encouraged because I want it to be very much her story and our story. She disagrees with the fact that she has hoarding disorder she is still very much in denial about her illness, I think its her strong sense of pride, which is an asset I wouldn't want her to lose, so parts of it inside the house are hard for her to deal with but she feels that this could hopefully help other families struggling with this illness and therefore supports the film.

Without clinical diagnostic criteria, do you think it is difficult for people to understand just how destructive obsessive hoarding can be?
We included a few clips of interviews with doctors about this disorder in the film but we didn't use too much because it really wasn't working since this is such a personal story, it felt foreign to suddenly have a talking head tell you about the disorder. I tried developing other creative ways to get this information across but that too felt jarring since the footage is very cinema verite and I didn't want to break the focus of the story, which is about a family in crisis. I think this story has just as much to do with poverty and being an immigrant, single mother as it has to do with hoarding disorder. I feel there are so many factors that go into hoarding disorder and each case is so individualized depending on that persons psychological, socio-economic, and trauma background that it was more important for me to share my mother's personal story, rather than generalize about hoarding disorder. Besides, I also feel like its so dehumanizing to just categorize someone as mentally ill and therefore they have such and such symptoms and that is who they are. No, that is only a small part of who they are, they could be a talented musician or have other strength that need to be taken into context. I think the film shows for itself how destructive it can be when you remove someone from their security…by showing how traumatic it was for my mother. But, the film follows our journey into learning about hoarding disorder, I didn't even know it existed when I first started making this film and didn't think my mom had it until I really started to observe her everyday life. So I felt it was more about the discovery about the illness than making a film about this topic.

What were the biggest challenges in constructing the film? Did you deliberate how certain editorial decisions would reflect on your mother?
Yes, we were very conscious of being sensitive to how we portrayed my mother and brothers. I wanted to make sure the audience had a chance to meet my mom as a vibrant woman who has an amazing philosophy on life and cared about saving the environment and has a lot of strong morals we should all be concerned about as a community. I held back from focusing too much on the condition of the house because my mother was hesitent at first to letting us inside so I wanted to be true to the story and refrain from letting us inside. It was also a careful balance how much of the story was mine vs. my mother's, so I held back my personal story to let her story shine. I also incorporated some editorial decisions my mother requested, for example, getting to know her side of the story before we hear from the neighbors. I wanted to give her the upper hand in most situations and let her voice be heard.

Are any other projects in the pipeline?
I would like to possibly develop a fictional version of my life, from when I left home on. This would involve some of the subject matter I deal with at the crisis center G.E.M.S, commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking, www.gems-girls.org. There is a documentary by David Schisgal you all should check out, "Very Young Girls", that focuses on our girls in particular. Working at GEMS I have become very dedicated to this subject matter and would like to explore and heal from my own exposure to it through filmmaking but mostly I want to go back to school and get my Masters in Social Work so I can become better trained in helping people.

check it out! pic from interview with Michael Jones of Variety...

http://www.wireimage.com/GalleryListing.asp?nbc1=1&navtyp=CAL====300787&ym=200801

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117935974.html?categoryid=31&cs=1&nid=2562

Slamdance
My Mother's Garden (Documentary)
By JOE LEYDON

A Seethrough Films production, in association with Flourish Films, Still Point Pictures, Eye Heart Films. Produced by Adi Amit, Alessandra Dobrin, Elisabeth Harris, Susannah Ludwig. Executive producers, Richard Dobrin, Eric Watson. Directed by Cynthia Lester. Written by Jeremy Stulberg, Lester, Rachel Zaslow, Elisabeth Harris.

With: Eugenia Lester.
Narrator: Cynthia Lester.

Cynthia Lester's deeply and sometimes unsettlingly personal doc gives an up-close view of a woman -- Lester's 61-year-old mother -- whose severe hoarding disorder has profoundly affected her life and the lives of her children. "My Mother's Garden" isn't likely to bloom theatrically, but its educational and therapeutic value may enable it to harvest steady, long-term homevid sales.
As her daughter explains in sometimes measured, sometimes anxious narration, Eugenia Lester remains indelibly influenced by her childhood experiences in post-WWII Poland, where hoarding was a method of survival. Decades after moving to the U.S., Eugenia continues to hoard trash and treasures indiscriminately, to the point where she must sleep in her garden because there's literally no more room in a house stuffed with junk of all shapes and sizes. The filmmaker and her two brothers recall leaving home at very early ages to escape intolerable conditions (and avoid mocking classmates). Despite their own psychological scars, however, the siblings return to save their troubled and possibly manic-depressive mother -- who defiantly insists she doesn't need saving -- before authorities evict her. Tech values are minimal, but not off-puttingly so.

Camera (color, DV), Magela Crosignani, Lester; editors, Alessandra Dobrin, Jeremy Stulberg; music, T. Griffin. Reviewed on DVD, Houston, Jan. 17, 2008. (In Slamdance Film Festival -- competing.) Running time: 69 MIN.

We are so blessed to be accepted into the TRUE/FALSE FILM FESTIVAL (Feb. 28-March 2). This is going to be an amazing experience for us. please visit www.truefalse.org for more info....

It's Official...
"I am very pleased to say that the True/False Film Fest would like to
officially invite MY MOTHER'S GARDEN. as a spotlighted selection at
our upcoming fest, Feb. 28-March 2. It is a richly realized portrait
of a remarkable woman, done with creative flair, and it has tremendous
resonance for so many of us. (I for one never knew that this
propensity had a clinical name!) Our whole team is extremely enthused
and proud to host you at the festival."

thanks Danielle, the NY film scene rocks!

http://weblog.indiepix.net/

January 27, 2008