By Dan Dinello

Director Tod Lending

On his first day of filming a 1994 PBS documentary about a promising black student named Terrell Collins, filmmaker Tod Lending interviewed Collins’s maternal grandmother, Dorothy Jackson. She described the despair and violence of living in Chicago’s Henry Horner Homes and her hopes for her grandson’s future. Two hours later, 14-year-old Terrell was shot to death a few blocks from home.

Terrell’s murder inspired Lending to continue filming, documenting three generations of the Collins family over five years. Nominated for an Academy Award, Legacy tells the inspiring story of a family struggling to overcome the death-grip of poverty.

In dealing with their grief, a friendship formed between Lending and Collins’s family. "I identified with their loss," says Lending, who grew up in an integrated south Evanston neighborhood, "As a kid, I helplessly saw my best friend drown. I’ve always had a thing about dealing with loss. I wanted to find out how Terrell’s death would impact the family and whether they could transform themselves."

Terrell’s grandmother, Dorothy, dreams of leaving the projects; her daughter, Wanda – Terrell’s mother – battles crack addiction; another daughter, Alaissa, struggles to escape welfare; and niece Nickcole, determined to fulfill Terrell’s legacy, strives to be the first family member to graduate high school and go on to college. Despite economic, social and psychological barriers, each woman eventually triumphs.

Clockwise from top left: Alaissa Collins, Nickole Collins, Dorothy Jackson, Wanda Collins

Though community supporters played a crucial role in their success, making the film also helped motivate the family’s transformation. "After Terrell’s death, the filming helped us to see what was really happening in our lives," explains Nickcole, Legacy’s narrator and focused family leader. Nickole ties the film’s many stories into a cohesive narrative as she navigates her own way out of the welfare cycle while occasionally criticizing and prodding her mother, Alaissa.

"Tod was like part of the family, part of our support system," adds Nickcole. He helped me help my mom get off welfare. He pushed Wanda to kick the habit." When a drug-rehab program closed their doors to Wanda, putting her on a waiting list, Lending told the program coordinators he wanted to film her. The doors opened.

"Often it was difficult and confusing to navigate both worlds, being a friend and being a filmmaker," explains Lending, a 41-year-old filmmaker who previously directed, wrote and produced an award winning three-part documentary series "No Time to be a Child" that aired nationally on PBS, and who won an Emmy Award for the ABC after-school special "Shades of a Single Protein." Once when a gas line blew up near the Horner projects, pipes broke and water flooded the family’s apartment. The Collins’s called Lending. "I got a truck and helped them move furniture. I thought, ‘This is a great scene,’ but I needed to be there as friend not a filmmaker."

While taking an unflinching look at social ills for which bureaucratic bungling and personal failings bear an equal burden, Legacy works viscerally, bursting with emotionally wrenching real-life moments: Wanda’s wailing anguish at Terrell’s funeral; Dorothy’s joyful embrace of Nickcole on her graduation day; the family moving Dorothy into her new house even before the workmen have finished the front stairs.

In addition to its critically acclaimed premiere at the Sundance Film Festival last year and screenings at other national and international festivals, Legacy – which will be broadcast on HBO in June 2001 – is part of an extensive three-year outreach program.

At a cost of 1.3 million dollars – twice the film’s budget – The Legacy Outreach Campaign is facilitated by a national network of partners, such as Boys & Girls Club of America and the Center for Community Change. With support from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation and HBO, the outreach program has produced an elaborate viewer’s guide and Web site in addition to organizing free screening events in over one thousand communities so far. "This is probably the most complex, far reaching and impactful outreach program [for a film] ever," says organizer Judy Ravitz.

One outreach partner, Generations United, is even using the film as a springboard for a federal statute. "This bill will provide housing opportunities for grandparents raising grandchildren," says its co-author, Congresswoman Jan Schakowski (Democrat, 9th Congressional District). "Besides helping the individual family, this is the epitome of filmmaking as social action," says Lending.

Frequently, Lending and members of the Collins family participate in community screenings. Wanda recently spoke at four San Diego substance abuse recovery centers while Nickcole appeared at the Los Angeles Women’s Foundation. "After seeing the movie, people are in tears," says Nickcole, now student teaching and happily married. "It’s good to have someone there from the movie, it means so much to [the audience] and to my family. We can actually give advice. I feel like I’m helping them. That’s Terrell’s legacy."

For additional information, see http://www.legacymovie.com

Legacy is distributed by California Newsreel, http://www.newsreel.org.