Excerpted from:

The Arlington Advocate
Thursday, August 16, 2001

Filmmaker sheds light on 'lifestyles of the unknown'
By Dana Fronczak

There's a part in the documentary "Lifestyles of the Poor and Unknown" that hits the essence of what fledgling Arlington moviemaker tried to bring across.

About 10 minutes into the 45-minute video production, Fliesler is interviewing her younger sister Marni Jamieson, who is mildly mentally retarded. Marni lives with her husband Kris Jamieson in a small apartment in Queens, and the two are talking about finances.

"Kris is a wonderful, wonderful young man," Marni says, "but he likes to spend his money."

It is this kind of depth of emotion - sarcasm, playfulness, a little exaggeration, a little seriousness - that Fliesler wanted to expose in portraying the lives of two mentally disabled adults trying to make it on their own.

"There's a feeling of, 'Oh, they're so cute,'" Fliesler said, talking about the typical portrayal of disabled folks. "I wanted to show them as people."

"Lifestyles of the Poor and Unknown" will be shown tonight at 8 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts and Saturday at noon. Fliesler shot and produced the movie herself, working on a budget of under $20,000. She shot 40 hours of footage over two years during 25 separate visits.

It's not an entirely new medium. Fliesler previously shot an independent educational program called "Going Wild" which she produced at Arlington Cable Television. She currently works as an associate producer of educational science programming for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Science Media Group.

Her movie opens starkly, with a description of the lawsuit her parents filed against the physician "because they thought that what was wrong with me was the doctor's fault," Marni Jamieson said.

In a quick twist, the camera is turned on the filmmaker Fliesler as her sister asks her why she's making this movie.

"I wanted to send people in one direction, like we were going to tell a story," said Fliesler, "but then switch it around. I hoped it to be jolting."

Instead, the movie twists into a very personal narrative of Kris and Marni. Fliesler narrates nothing. Instead, she splices interviews with the couple individually and together with footage of their housewarming party in their Queens apartment and at their jobs - Marni at a sheltered workshop run by Goodwill Industries and Kris as a maintenance man and stockroom worker at Kids 'R' Us.

A key element to the story revolves around their jobs. Kris works independently, makes above the minimum wage and has a caring and understanding boss. Marni makes at times less than a dollar an hour for her work (sheltered workshops have special exemptions from minimum-wage law). She deals with an agency that Fliesler said needed pushing to help Marni toward her goal of a job in the "outside" world.

Goodwill refused to allow Fliesler to film Marni at her jobsite, despite repeated calls to lawyers and administrators at the nonprofit agency. Fliesler instead filmed her phone calls.

"I felt that obviously Marni's work was an important part of her life," she said.

Important enough that Fliesler documents her sister's growing frustration and waning self-esteem as she languishes in the sheltered workshop.

Marni ends up getting pretty resentful of her sister, too.

When Fliesler earned her bachelor's degree, from Oberlin College, her sister started to call her "genius," a label coated thick with sarcasm. When Fliesler earned her master's degree, she said Marni gave her "a typical Hallmark card, but she didn't write anything in it and she didn't sign it."

"When Marni actually saw that on film, I think she felt a little bad about it," Fliesler now recalls.

The director of "Lifestyles of the Poor and Unknown" now says she's caught the video bug.

Sandwiched between an older sister, Vicki, who has autism and Marni, Fliesler said that she now has a different appreciation of her family.

"I realized that I did not talk too much about the fact that I had disabled siblings," Fliesler said. "(Now) I feel almost proud that I have a sister like Marni."