SYNOPSIS

This is a film about one man’s words. These are the words of an Irish priest who came to Camden, New Jersey, forty years ago and never left. They are the extraordinary words of a natural-born poet, Father Michael Doyle, the Poet of Poverty.

Father Doyle’s words bear witness to a horrendous crime: the total neglect of America’s poorest city, Camden, New Jersey. They began as words written for monthly letters that serve as a lifeline to those who support his church. But, as a friend once told Doyle, these prose-poem letters are really his ministry.

Using Michael Doyle’s letters as its subject, the film is a record of his parish and city – a month after month, year after year documentation of the consequences of poverty. Camden, already poor when Doyle arrived, now resembles nothing more than a bombed-out urban landscape. “Yet we have to live in the meantime,” writes Doyle. And his letters are a testimony to the lives lived amidst urban decay, drug trade, murders, and prostitution. As well as to lives lived in a dumping ground, filled with everything that the surrounding wealthy communities don’t want in their own back yards: sewage, trash, scrap metal, and prisons.

There is anger in Doyle’s letters, and sadness and despair, but also delight in the small accomplishments of the community, and the parish priest’s faith and hope for the children of Camden.

The scenes that Doyle writes about in his letters are shown in the film, giving visual expression to the words written by this poet laureate of poverty.

DIRECTORS’ STATEMENT

I met Michael Doyle for the first time in the summer of 2000. I was covering the Republican Convention in Philadelphia for Dutch Television and decided to do a story about George W. Bush’s ideas of compassionate conservatism. I wanted to explore how religious organizations could take on the war against poverty. What better way to illustrate the problems inherent in this idea than in the poorest city in America, Camden, New Jersey, across the Delaware river from Philadelphia.

When we met, Father Doyle added my name to his list of almost three thousand people to whom he sends a letter each month.

His letters struck a chord. Their honesty, their story telling, the scenes he described, the anger and the sorrow at the destruction he saw all around him, and yes, the poetry of his language, made an indelible impression on me. Slowly the thought rose to make a film based on these letters.

When Tana Ross (co-director) and I discussed ideas for future documentaries, I gave her one of Michael’s letters to read. She was equally moved by what she read and right there we decided we wanted to make a film based on Father Doyle’s letters. In our first meeting with Father Doyle in Camden, he suggested that we talk to Sean Dougherty, who is an independent producer and a congregant at Sacred Heart Church. Over the years Sean had filmed various events at Sacred Heart and knew Camden well. He had also thought of turning his material into a film and the idea of basing it on the letters appealed to him.

For the next four years, in between our other work, we would get together in Camden to film and edit. We decided to accompany Michael Doyle on his yearly visit to Ireland, since so much in the letters is rooted in Irish culture, history, and story telling. Many times over these years, we doubted if making a film based on words would work. We were pulled by our basic journalistic instincts of wanting to explain poverty in America, the history of the decline of Camden, and to give facts and figures. But always, the words would pull us back.

Many times, we also wondered if we needed a narrative line with a satisfying conclusion, say the story of a priest who worked against all odds and won. But there is no triumphant story to tell. There is no heroic narrative in the letters, they “groan and smile, weep and rejoice” as Michael’s friend Daniel Berrigan wrote, “telling of the task of being a priest in America’s saddest city.”

So we stuck to the letters and had them read by Martin Sheen, whose own pastor comes from Ireland and is a friend of Michael Doyle.

It came natural to us to have the opening scene of the film come from the very letter which first touched us four years ago.