“Sister Helen,� the documentary feature by local filmmaker Rob Fruchtman and his partner, Rebecca Cammisa, is one of the most deeply affecting movies I have ever seen. A winner of multiple awards when it debuted in 2002, including the Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival, it richly deserves every one.
The indomitable woman of the title, Helen Travis, was a Benedictine nun who ran a shelter for homeless men — former alcoholics and drug addicts — in the South Bronx. We learn during the course of the film that this remarkable act of kindness and bravery is more than that. It is also a form of atonement for Sister Helen, whose husband and younger son died from alcohol and drugs, respectively, whose older son was murdered as a teenager, whose daughter is partially estranged from her — and who herself is a recovering alcoholic. “I was given a second chance,� she is fond of saying. “How many chances do you have?�
But Sister Helen is no gentle-hearted saint. She practices “tough love.� She is the sort of gravelly voiced, confrontational, profane and brash person who, if you didn’t know that this is real, you would call the perfect caricature of a New Yorker — the type who is never wrong. She wears glasses with oversized frames, occasionally dyes her gray hair henna, and totters around “the house� with a painful gait, dispensing bromides and ultimatums to her 20 or so male housemates.
In one wrenching scene, Sister Helen confronts one of her residents, who has gone back to drinking, on a street corner. Clearly drunk on camera, the man professes his love for Sister Helen, and later, despite many threats by Sister Helen to throw him out of the house, he is back. (Earlier in the film, she has thrown out one resident who refused to bathe, telling him that he needed to seek psychiatric help.)
In another brutal showdown, she threatens to send away a longtime resident whose urine test has come back positive for heroine. She remains deaf to his protests until the last moment, when he produces a bottle of cough medicine with codeine that he has been taking.
The extraordinary achievement of the filmmakers is that they were seemingly able to make themselves so invisible as to be able to record such intimate personal events on camera, and to obtain the trust and permission of the subjects to do so. (That this cooperation was not coerced is confirmed by the fact that two or three people in the film have their faces blurred.)
Fruchtman has called this technique “verité,� and it is 180 degrees removed from the style of, say, Michael Moore. There are moments when we think Sister Helen, in her brashness, must be performing for the camera, but we soon realize that this is her completely authentic self.
“Sister Helen� has a shocking ending that will leave no eyes dry — one that proves beyond a doubt the power of a single person to make a difference in people’s lives.
“Sister Helen� will be shown at The Moviehouse in Millerton on Sunday, Sept. 30, at 11:30 a.m., as part of the FilmWorks Forum series. A Q&A session with director Rob Fruchtman will follow. The film is unrated, but contains profanity.
