Desire
A film by Julie Gustafson and the Teenage Girls’ Documentary Project
reviewed by Monica Mankin

Filmmaker Julie Gustafson's Desire follows the lives of five New Orleans women, UPT, 7th Ward, & WB, over five years to see how affluence and opportunity affect desire.

“Don’t come to Desire. They don’t want you here,” said a voice over the telephone to documentary filmmaker Julie Gustafson. Over thirteen years ago, Gustafson was told, “People have come before and the people of the housing project get nothing out of it.”

Gustafson, who then resided in New York, was looking to make a documentary about the challenges faced by teenage girls as they develop their sexual identities.

“I wanted to make a documentary in New York,” recalls Gustafson. “I called an anthropologist who lived in New Orleans and she started talking about the Desire Street housing project, about the names of the streets.”

Many residents of New Orleans recognize the ironic significance of streets named Pleasure, Piety, Abundance and Treasure that snake through the Desire Street housing project, where a number of the city’s poverty-stricken citizens once lived. Gustafson recognized New Orleans as the landscape that would offer the metaphors organic to her documentary’s theme and purpose.

Consequently, she left New York in 1992 to begin fostering a relationship with the Desire Street community. Three years Gustafson spent getting to know the people.

“The women, the mothers you see in the film, were very concerned about how their daughters would be portrayed given the stigma attached to teenage pregnancy,” explains Gustafson, whose 2005 documentary Desire is scheduled for screening as part of the upcoming New Orleans Film Festival. “I wanted to be careful and I wanted to give something back.”

Gustafson decided to pay the girls who became involved with the documentary as collaborators on the film. She gave each girl a camera, lessons on filming techniques, and sometimes a prompt or a project suggestion. Gustafson imparted to the girls a sense of creativity. She created a space in which they could speak honestly about their experiences.

“It took a long time to make the film,” sighs Gustafson, recounting the challenges she faced during production. “Originally, we had nine girls, but we had too much wonderful footage. It was hard to make the decisions about what to cut.”

The result: The narratives of five teenage girls—Cassandra and Kimeca from the Desire Street projects; Tracy and Peggy, two affluent, uptown girls; and Tiffanie, a single mother from the suburban, working-class city of Belle Chase—documented over five years, bound by the thread of desire, and masterfully intertwined to reveal that the binding thread is indeed a tangled one.

“What do they want?” Gustafson’s voice asks at the start of the film as the camera pans over the sign posts that name the streets of the housing project. “Do they think they’ll get it?”

The girls’ narratives poignantly tackle Gustafson’s questions while embracing along the way topics such as teenage sex, pregnancy, abortion, body image, and confused sexuality. Each girl buckles in some way beneath the pressures that challenge her desires, but each girl finds a way to survive.

At one point, Kimeca, faced with answering a question about her baby’s father, questions the film’s director about her teenage desires and the choices she had made to achieve them.

“Since the women were concerned about how the girls would be portrayed, I decided before I began filming that if the girls wanted to ask me questions I would answer them on camera,” says Gustafson of her decision to reveal her own intimate challenges. “We all knew we each had something at stake.

Gustafson notes, “The girl’s desires were shaped by the choices they had, whether affluent or disadvantaged. What you want is shaped by what you can have. These girls felt influenced to make different decisions than those their mothers had made, yet they ended up making the same decisions.”

Although Gustafson never asks the question point blank, the documentary clearly implies the question (and its answer) of why the poverty cycle continues from one generation to the next. Gustafson strongly believes the lack of a good education contributes to stagnancy of women and children in poverty-stricken areas. Her perspective is evidenced in the film when Kimeca must drop out of school the third and final time because the demands of raising her children override those of completing her education.

“These girls don’t have the same opportunities to pursue their dreams,” remarks Gustafson. “And it’s not an individual problem; it’s a societal one. This idea that people can just pull themselves up by the bootstraps…” (Well, as I heard someone once say--It’s difficult to pull yourself up by the bootstraps when the boot is on your face.)

On film, Gustafson seems taken aback when Kimeca questions what she means when she refers to the project community as disadvantaged. “We aren’t disadvantaged,” Kimeca explains. “We can do whatever we want.”

“I had to really listen to her,” Gustafson says. “I needed to understand, against my skepticism, how strongly that, at the very least, they needed hope.”

As for Cassandra, who lived on Abundance Street with her mother and younger brother, the street names of the Desire housing project resonate not with irony but with hope. She says of her home, “When you think of the street names in the projects, you come up with so many ideas. You just want to feel good about yourself.”

The film will screen as the New Orleans Film Festival’s “Best of the Fest” on Sunday, October 15, 2006, 3:00 p.m. at the Contemporary Arts Center. Tickets are $7.50.
Monica Mankin is a regular correspondent for NOLAFugees.com.