A Masterpiece!

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

Diane is the mother, Love in the daughter, and Donyaeh is the HIV+ toddler that's Love's son (Diane's grandchild). While unwed mother Love struggles to raise her child she also must try to keep her mother Diane from relapsing into the 'crack' world that has dominated so much of her life.Extremely gripping documentary that puts you inside an impoverished household with seemingly no hope for survival. Somehow there are joyful moments to be found among the sad, and the struggle to make your child's life a little better than your own becomes all the more poignant.Gritty documentary is worth your time if you like your life-dramas on the heavy side.

What a heartbreaking story this is, and how beautifully and intimately told.Director Jennifer Dworkin is filming right inside the heart of this family's most delicate moments, their worst arguments, their most private discussions, their most personal moments of joy... it is a credit to Diane, to Love, and to all the other characters in this movie that they have allowed so much pain and privacy to be recorded on film so that other people might learn from their story or reflect on its causes and meanings. Everything you read in the reviews of this movie about the director's evident compassion and the careful, clear laying out of this complex story is true. Your emotional response to each moment is vivid, and if my own experience means anything, the conclusion is just as provocative and ideologically open-ended as the rest of the movie. Dworkin's tone of sophisticated, humane lucidity must have been very hard to preserve, both in filming and in editing the picture, but she has produced an invaluable document.As far as I know, Women Make Movies (headquartered in NYC) is the only organization with video prints available. As fantastic as WMM is, I wish the movie were more widely available, so that it could reach the broader audience it deserves, and even find its way to some powerful people who could make a difference for people in Love and Diane's circumstances. (Check university libraries, too, since some schools have obtained institutional copies of the video.)If the bond of family, the labor of forgiveness, the plight of the impoverished, the debates between personal responsibility and social determinism, the possibility of hope, or the continued survival of serious documentary film-making mean anything to you, this is a truly indispensable film.