Jacinta

There have been so many movies about drug addiction and its consequences to individual users, their families, and society, that audiences may feel numb to this heartbreaking subject. But if you think there’s nothing new to explore about the topic, Jessica Earnshaw’s Jacinta will cure you of that assumption. This modest but exceptional documentary, set in Maine, grabs hold of the viewer with the power I can only assume Shirley Clarke’s The Connection (1961) or Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park (1971) did for audiences of their eras. With a level of access I've never seen in a documentary about family, poverty, prison, and drug use, Earnshaw profiles a 26-year-old heroin-addicted woman named Jacinta, released from jail where she served alongside her mother Rosemary, also an addict, as she attempts to navigate life on the outside. Despite her desire to rebuild her life and maintain a loving connection with her own young daughter, Jacinta also nurtures her more powerful connection to heroin.

The trust this filmmaker must have established with her titular subject, her family, friends, suppliers, and fellow heroin users is unprecedented. The frankness with which Jacinta explains herself to us, and the scenes of her drug use captured with an uncritical and non-romanticized simplicity, hit the viewer like a ton of bricks. The scenes before and after scoring are even more brutal than the raw depictions of injecting. The exploration of Jacinta’s childhood is rendered all the more poignant by how well we get to know her as an adult. The futility of an addict’s fight to avoid recidivism and the specificity of this protagonist and her distinct family situation make Jacinta one of the sharpest and most heartbreaking documentaries on this subject.

Earnshaw films Jacinta, her mother living behind bars, her daughter living with her paternal grandparents, her family and friends, her drug providers (who often are her family and friends), as well as those who work in drug treatment programs, law enforcement, and the prison system, with sober clarity and without a hint of judgment. But the film’s depiction of cyclical, multi-generational drug use, petty crime, and incarceration, as well as the failure of institutions to address these problems in a meaningful way, is unmistakable. And yet we still are left rooting for Jacinta.