Ellie Lee - Lost

 

 

When I was in college, like most people in college, I had no idea what I was doing and I had no idea what I was supposed to study and what I was supposed to do with my life. So, coming as a child of an immigrant, actually as an immigrant myself, my family was rather poor when we were growing up, so we wanted to be practical. I felt this overwhelming need to study math and physics and computer science, which I did. But I never told my mom that my real passion was animation. 

 

I loved animating. I just discovered it in college. And to try to keep me grounded, as I was studying all these things, I also did a lot of volunteer work at the local homeless shelter in the greater Boston area. And I loved it. I loved also being there every night and just seeing these familiar faces. Year after year, I would see a lot of the same people, unfortunately, the same men and women. And over time, I got to become really close with a lot of the women there, and I'd also noticed a pattern emerge where they were all involved in very abusive relationships with other homeless men. 

 

Late at night, as they started seeing me more often and they started trusting me more, over the years, they started confiding these stories about how they had all been abused as young girls, either physically or sexually, and usually by people that they trusted. It was a family member or friend of the family. Years later, I found studies that estimated that in the Boston area, 86% of all homeless women had these kinds of histories. I remember thinking at the time like, why isn't this being addressed in training. When I go to other shelters, like why isn't this something that's even raised? It was back in the late 1980s, early 1990s. 

 

It's hard to imagine now, but back then, the idea of domestic violence was a fairly new term. It was a fairly new phenomenon to a lot of people. And it had existed for a long time, but never in the public eye. It was always something that happened with great deal of shame behind closed doors. There was this movement to raise awareness about this issue that affected every person, regardless of socioeconomic status. I remember thinking that if a film or something existed that could help in training at the shelters or even for the police department, when they saw a situation on the streets, they would know how to approach a woman. I decided as an undergraduate, well, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to make a documentary film about it. 

 

I was really excited that night. I went to the shelter, and I started talking to some of the women, and I told them my idea, and they loved it. They were like, “That's great. That would be a great service to our community, and that would be amazing.” And I said, “Oh, that's perfect. So, you'll be in it, right? You'll participate in the film?” And they said, “Absolutely not. No.” And of course, in that moment I thought about and I said, “Well, of course they're going to say no.” I remember that a lot of the women had confided that in these relationships, they wish that they could leave. They wished that they could break up with their boyfriends, but they were really scared. 

 

They were scared, because if they ever got into a fight with their boyfriend, they would say like, “Don't try to hide. Don't try to go somewhere, because I'll find you. There's only so many shelters in town, there's only so many meal programs, there's only so many drop-in centers and I will find you.” And the women didn't want to suffer the consequences of that. Imagine participating in a film, then all of a sudden, they're airing their dirty laundry and the boys would find them and they would have to suffer those consequences. So, I understood the women's reluctance to be involved, because they were still in crisis. 

 

After getting rejected by the women. I just still felt like, well, somebody needs to make a film like this. And that's when it occurred to me, well, maybe I could make it as animated documentary. I could use the animation in a way I could protect their identities and their anonymity, and it would keep them from being exposed, and I can still share their stories and their experiences and shed light on this issue. All of a sudden, it felt like my life made sense. I loved animation. And then, my work at college, and then my volunteer work at the shelter, it all came together. Suddenly, I felt like I had a purpose. 

 

So, I set off and I started interviewing a lot of homeless women and formerly homeless women. They would serve as the soundtrack for my film. And then, I decided to use charcoal drawings as my animation medium. The charcoal was perfect for me, because I felt like-- Depending on the texture of the paper, the line could be really peaceful and delicate or really violent, snd somehow that could mirror the emotional journeys that a lot of the women were going through. 

 

And then, as the character featured in the film, I would use a character that looked like me, because I felt like I was a conduit for so much of their experiences. It made sense. In a way, it made the film even more personal, I was really, really invested in this film. And so, by the time I was finished with it-- And for those of you who are not familiar with animation, animation is incredibly laborious and tedious. In any given second, you have anywhere from 4 to 12 unique drawings per second. So, it's incredibly time consuming. After a year and a half of working on this film, I had a thousand drawings that I'd created, and I was so overjoyed because I was that much closer to finishing this film. 

 

At the same time, I was not overjoyed by the fact that I was totally broke and I had to move back in with my parents. [audience laughter] So, I called my mom and I was like, “Can you help me move out of my place? This is my last day.” And she said, “Sure, no problem. I'll come over right now.” So, she comes in with a car. I didn't have that much stuff. It all fit in one carload. And the last things to go were my artwork. I put it in the trunk and I closed the trunk and we drove off. 

 

We're driving on store drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is a very speedy windy parkway. Cars are going about 40 or 50 miles an hour. Most of the time it's a two-lane parkway, sometimes three with no shoulder. And then, it started getting cloudy. And out of nowhere, there was just a downpour, just pouring buckets of rain. We're driving along, and there's a really sharp turn, a very sharp left turn that you have to make on my way to home. As my mom's making this turn, she hit a pothole, which normally would be totally fine, except for the fact that there was a problem with the trunk. When I had put my artwork in and slammed the trunk shut, I didn't realize the trunk was just really stuck, but not fully locked. 

 

So, it's raining, we're going 45 miles an hour, we hook this sharp left, she hits a pothole, and the trunk popped open, and only the artwork, a thousand drawings, just slid out into two lanes of traffic in the pouring rain. It's rush hour, so I'm seeing all these cars drive over my artwork. I was in a state of shock. I looked in the rearview mirror, I started freaking out. I was like, “Mom, turn around. Please turn around.” Like, “This is a disaster.” It took us 10 minutes to whip around. There's no shoulder, so I'm like, “Stop the car. Stop the car.” I get out in the middle of the parkway and there's traffic all around me. I'm trying to salvage what I can. As I pick up a stack of my drawings, they just melted in my hands like pulp. It was completely destroyed. I'd lost everything. 

 

And by the time I got home, I just remember just sitting on my parents’ couch and staring at a piece of lint on the carpet for four hours. I was completely catatonic. I had no idea what I was doing anymore. And that year that followed, I tried desperately to recreate the film, because I felt like I could resurrect it, but I was completely out of steam and out of gas. I gave everything to this project. Emotionally, I'd been invested in it for three years. I just didn't have anything left in me. Part of me also felt like it was torture, like, why would I want to do this to myself again to force myself through the motions of doing something I'd already done? It was so fragile, like who's to say that's not going to get lost again when I'm done but this next round? 

 

So, at that point, I decided to just give up on animation completely. I just never wanted to animate ever again. So, I moved on, and I tried other things, and it was okay. Five years later, I felt this nagging pull that was holding me back and I felt like it was this film. I had made a promise to these women, when they shared their stories with me, I felt like they deserved at least one more attempt by me to try to bring these stories to life. So, I knew I needed help. So, I applied for a bunch of grants. I was very lucky to cobble together some grants, so I could hire a team of animators to work with me. 

 

3,000 drawings later, we were done with the film. It was amazing. I was so excited, and I was starting it with work on the film and edit it. When I got a phone call, I got an invitation to screen a work in progress at this new organization, a non-profit in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called On The Rise. They work specifically with chronically homeless women. I thought it was just a perfect match. 

 

So, I screened at their opening event. It was attended by a small group of people, about 30 people. Afterwards, a woman came up to me-- To protect her identity, I'll call her Annie. Annie came up to me. I just remember vividly this woman who was shaking and unable to make eye contact with me. It was almost as though she felt invisible. She didn't feel comfortable in her own shell, and she said, “Thank you so much for making this film. You really captured what it's like to be homeless.” 

 

As we started talking, I learned a little bit more about Annie, that she'd been homeless for about a decade. She'd lost custody of her son once she started living on the streets. She was a heroin addict, and all of her friends were addicts as well. She had just gone to a doctor, because she wasn't feeling well. The doctor had given her some bad news that she had a life-threatening condition, and that she didn't radically change her lifestyle and get some support and help, that she would probably be dead within a year. And that was her wake up call, and that's what brought her on the rise. She was taking those first steps to get help. 

 

I really appreciated her saying. What she said about the film, I felt like I was just very touched and moved by her. 18 months later, I was at this point, a board member for On The Rise. I was attending a luncheon and it was a fundraiser, a small event. I saw a woman who looked really familiar. As I approached her, I realized it was Annie. She looked totally different. She looked six inches taller. She was glowing, and radiant, and gorgeous. She looked me directly in the eye and everything had changed. She was no longer homeless. She was living in her own apartment. She had reconnected with her son. 

 

Because of her advocacy work for homelessness organizations and homeless people, she had been invited to join the board of the National Coalition for the Homeless, which is a really influential organization in Washington, D.C. She had just gotten a scholarship to go back to college, and she was going to school at night while working during the day, and she had taken her health back, and she was training for the Boston Marathon. [audience laughter] She was amazing. I was moved to tears, and I said, “Annie, how did you do it? How did this happen?” She said, “You know, On The Rise helped me a lot. I couldn't have done it without them. But I think the moment that really changed my life was when I saw your film.” And up until that point-- Thank you. [audience cheers and applause] 

 

Thanks. “Up until that point, I beat myself up every day for making bad decisions, and finding myself in these hopeless situations, and not feeling like I could do anything to get out of it. When I saw your film, I realized I wasn't alone. And not only that, I recognized voices in the film. And these were women that I looked up to, because they were formerly homeless and now doing something to change people's lives.” Like, “I didn't know Macy had suffered from a history of abuse. I didn't know Peggy felt trapped and ashamed about her past and what had happened to her. Once I understood that, it wasn't my fault, I didn't have to blame myself anymore. There was this bigger societal problem, and it had a name, and I could defeat it. I could beat it. At that point, I realized I didn't have to beat myself up anymore and I could beat this thing.” And she did. 

 

Looking back, those seven years of anguish and kicking myself and feeling at this incredibly low point and struggling with this film and with my career and all these questions, I made this film in an attempt to save my friends, the women at the shelter, and I realized that it was the women that saved me. Thank you.