Welfare

At the Waverly Welfare Center in New York, people seeking assistance meet with the staff responsible for helping them. The film follows their conversations, arguments and attempts to address problems involving housing, unemployment, health, divorce, children and old age. It is marked by despair, long waits and the frustration of being sent from one agency to another. People’s personal circumstances repeatedly run up against inflexible bureaucratic procedures. Even staff members who genuinely want to help must work within a system whose requirements rarely reflect people’s actual needs. Requests for assistance become exhausting attempts to be heard and to escape the endless cycle of waiting, scrutiny and having to explain themselves.

Fredericks Wiseman – One of the most important and influential documentary filmmakers,he has made more than 45 films about institutions, districts, and small towns. The principles of his filmmaking: no filmed interviews, no explanatory commentary, no additional music, and a montage that does not structure what is shown on the basis of an otherwise common chronological narration, but orders individual sequences according to rhetorical arguments.