Lalee's Kin: The Legacy of Cotton

When HBO asked Maysles Films in 1996 to take one of its "direct cinema" looks at poverty at the end of the millennium, director Susan Froemke had no idea they'd end up in the Mississippi Delta. Or that there, amid the Delta's essentially Third-World conditions, she, with Al Maysles behind the camera, would find two perfect human stories (and two perfect storytellers) to illustrate how in this affluent country such poverty can possibly exist.

LaLee, a former sharecropper, is the 62-year-old mother of 11, grandmother of 38, and great-grandmother of 15 who, as the matriarch in a family where men are scarce (many are in prison), is responsible for putting food on the table. Living in a trailer without running water, one of her regular burdens is driving to a public hose on the county jail grounds with a trunk full of plastic jugs, filling them up, and then lugging them back home. Although LaLee is illiterate, she is determined that the children in her extended family will go to school.

Which leads us to Reggie Barnes, the Superintendent of Schools in West Tallahatchie, who was hired to get the school district with its substandard test scores off probation. Dynamic and determined to succeed at the seemingly Sisyphean task of raising test scores at a school where kindergartners often don't know their own names, much less their colors, Barnes steadfastly believes that if the children of illiterate parents can be educated, the cycle of poverty can be broken. He's hopeful, but he's also a realist: It won't be easy.

Just when the hopelessness of it all seems insurmountable, there's Granny, LaLee's sixth-grade granddaughter. Granny didn't make it to the first day of school because her mother didn't have money for supplies. But Granny has higher plans for herself and arranges to go live with her paternal grandfather in Memphis where she succeeds academically and actually formulates some professional goals for herself. Alas, just then, mom summons her back to the Delta to help her with the other kids.

The film is beautifully shot in 16mm mostly by Maysles ­ amazingly, using only available light. Froemke and Maysles shot the film over three years, coming down from New York for shoots with fingers crossed that something important would happen while they happened to be there, though, of course, so much of that was fortuitous. In the end, the real fortuity was in finding LaLee, who is a complete natural and takes to direct cinema's fly-on-the-wall presence with aplomb. Best yet, says Froemke, "When we'd knock at her door, she'd call out, 'Come in ­ I'm not ready!' ­ the same way Edie Beale used to greet us when we'd knock on her door during the Grey Gardens [1976] shoot." Those words are music to a cinema verite-ist's ears.