Please contact us
with corrections
or breaking news
Overlooked & Underrated Docs & Features
(click on broll or dschwartz for all his posts)
Paycheck to Paycheck: The Price of Poverty What is it like to have your life covered by a documentary film crew working for Maria Shriver’s multi-platform project, "The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink"?
And then to have the resulting film shown on HBO, and then made available to the world for free online the week of March 17, 2014, and then to meet President Obama at his signing of a bill to raise the minimum age for federal contract employees, and then...
Fade Out.
Fade in, a year earlier, to the life of Katrina Gilbert, a 30-year-old single mother of three working a full-time job in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with multiple health-challenges and no health insurance. Gilbert makes $9.49 an hour, but don’t worry, at the end of the film which follows her and her children through the course of a year, she gets a raise—fourteen cents.
And, of course, she gets the resulting aforementioned celebrity. Hopefully, probably, she and her children will reap the benefits of winning this chosen-for-an-HBO-documentary lottery.
Not so, the 42 million American women and their 28 million children living near or below the poverty line.
Our heart aches, of course, as we view Katrina Gilbert struggle to live her life, to take care of her children, and to better her life. That’s the noble intention—and inevitable result—of Shari Cookson’s and Nick Doob’s “Paycheck to Paycheck: The Life and Times of Katrina Gilbert”.
Like most of the documentary films I see, this one should be required viewing for all elected officials and highly-placed bureaucrats in our nation, the wealthiest in the world—the last time I looked, at least. If they took the film in, if they were inspired by their self-professed family values, there would be massive policy changes in our federal and state governments.
To see this film for free, it will be available online from HBO.com, ShriverReport.org, and YouTube.com the week of March 17th.