Love and Diane 2002

In an exceptionally good year for documentaries can you be persuaded to spend 21/2 hours (covering three years) with Diane Hazzard, a 40-year-old former crack addict living on welfare with Love, her troubled 18-year-old daughter; Love’s baby son Donyeah, who is HIV positive; and the five other children who spent six years in foster homes because she neglected them? We hope so, because Love and Diane fleshes out the stereotypes on all sides of welfare dependency with the psychological insight and complexity of a great novel. It is one of the year’s most gripping and rewarding films in any genre. — BG

“From first shot to last, Dworkin’s movie is a continuously absorbing, sometimes revelatory, frequently moving experience; as documentary filmmaking it’s not only amazingly intimate but also characterized by an unexpected lyricism… Dworkin’s film feels like a collaborative enterprise; her subjects are the authors of their lives. The struggle for redemption is hardly an uncommon movie story, but Love and Diane redeems that cliché as an ongoing process.” — J. Hoberman, Village Voice