HOT SPRINGS DOCUMENTARY FF INTERVIEW: Jessica Earnshaw talks about her film, JACINTA

Earnshaw’s JACINTA is a tough film to watch in all the right ways. The winner of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival’s Jury Prize for Best US Feature looks hard and without blinking at drug addiction as it follows Jacinta and her struggles to overcome addiction, get out of jail, stay clean, and rebuild a relationship with her daughter. A relationship that has sad parallels to that with her mother, also in jail due to her drug addiction history.

There is a tension throughout the film as we, the audience, watch Jacinta and her mom and her daughter, hoping they will navigate each of their paths toward a better life. We hear the numbers associated with drug addiction, and we talk about it in the abstract, but Earnshaw sits next to a person in a car as she makes a fateful decision to get high, and she gives us the opportunity to see the dots connect right in front of us as the tragic nature of it passes from generation to generation.

In the interview, Earnshaw and I talk about how she balanced out the time and focus on each of the trio, the filmmaker’s heartbreak of cutting down hundreds of hours of footage to an hour and a half, the times that struck her as signature moments while filming and editing, the filmmaker’s ethical decisions and the line they draw as a filmmaker versus a concerned human being regarding the subject. What is the responsibility of the filmmaker in those moments? This is a great conversation addressing that question.