Some writing about “Guardian Angels”
Heidi Pickering and her daughter Willow Pickering sit on the couch in their home in Maidenhead, UK. Still image from Guardian Angels (2015).
Guardian Angels is a documentary short about two women, Sue Brett and Heidi Pickering, as they navigate everyday life during Christmastime in Maidenhead, England.
I produced this short film alongside two of my closest childhood friends, Matt Brondoli and Zach Goldberg. We had just graduated college and somehow found our way into a little bit of money (long story that I may write about another time) to produce a film about a charity in Maidenhead. The initial idea from the backers was to create something that could help the charity raise awareness for some of the work they were doing (though when we met Sue Brett, the main character of the movie, that changed a bit...). It was our first project out of college as a team, my first as a "director" (whatever I thought that meant back then is not what I've come to learn it actually means). We had no institutional support really, so we bought a really nice microphone (pro tip: audio is the most important thing always) a decent camera and a couple lenses. We were green-behind-the-ears and ambitious, hoping to make a masterpiece of a movie. Suffice it to say, not everything went according to plan. But... well, it never does... And what we found, or I should say who we met, changed all of our lives for the better: Sue Brett.
When we arrived in the United Kingdom (after an awkward encounter with the border patrol who I had to convince over the course of roughly an hour of questioning that we were not in the UK to produce a documentary) and had about six months to figure out who the heck we were going to film, what it was going to be about, and how we were going to go about doing it. Planning, as it turned out, was not my strongest trait. We started shadowing some of the charity workers at the food bank. We volunteered at events and showed up to all the different things the foundation helped organize: food drives, homeless shelters, support groups, etc. That's how we met Sue.
Every Monday, Sue Brett organized meetings (among a zillion other programs she organized and things she did for those in need) for single moms who were living paycheck to paycheck and trying to raise a family on their own. The group partly worked as a tool for Sue to deliver day to day needs to the moms (fresh produce, toys, bedding, etc.) and partly a place for everyone to just hang out (an hour or two of shared childcare like this is a huge deal for single parents). They met in the nursery of a large protestant church on the outskirts of downtown Maidenhead.
The church has a tall, gothic tower that loomed over the surrounding neighborhoods. It gave everything we did there this cold, authoritarian aura that felt oddly out of place against the warm, nurturing environment that Sue cultivated. The three of us, Zach, Matt and myself, all rolled into this meeting of single moms and immediately I was floored by Sue's presence. She has this unique ability to make everyone in her vicinity feel loved and protected, myself included. She is a larger-than-life person who is so firmly dedicated to serving others that everyone she touches becomes a better person. When we first met her, she handed us all big mugs of steaming tea and asked, with milk or not? We hung out with her over the course of that meeting, and we listened to the moms share about their lives. One of these moms, Heidi Pickering, would become the other main character in the documentary.
Sue Brett is also a controversial figure in Maidenhead, as she disrupts the status quo in big ways. Her ideas are radical in their simplicity as she reminds people of Jesus' real teachings: absolute self-sacrifice in service and love of others. This rattles local leaders, particularly politicians, who have numerous reasons to not push the status quo too far in one direction or another (and certainly not to practice the kind of radical service to community that Sue does). On numerous occasions I was in a meeting or at an event, and I overheard the mutterings of politicians or religious leaders (always people with power) who would say Sue's name with a bit of resentful distaste. This always made me smile. An official from the church where Sue held the meetings (I won't mention them by name), for example, would yell at us numerous times over the next month or so for filming without a release form on the church's property, despite the total approval of Sue Brett and the moms in the support group. I was never sure why she yelled at us, but looking back now, I suspected that deep down she didn't really want Sue's story out there.
People flock to Sue. Just in the time we spent with her, hundreds of volunteers showed up to help Sue with a variety of different things: bedding for children, toys for Christmas, food for the homeless, cooked meals, winter coats, etc. The list goes on and on of the number of things that absolute strangers did to help people in need who told me that they were inspired by Sue and what she does. They all wanted to play their own part in the story of what Sue was cultivating. I talked with dozens of volunteers, mostly women, who told me how much Sue has changed their lives by showing them what it means to serve a community, to be a part of a community.
It was all enough to make the goal of our movie clear: to try to show some of Sue's magic in our own way. We wanted to make a movie that helped remind viewers what Sue reminded us: that the truth of life is hidden in our daily actions, that inside of the absurdity of life, small acts of kindness and love always win out. It was a lesson that I needed to learn then, and it is a lesson that I continuously strive to learn in my work and my own life.
We structured the movie around Christmas because that's when Sue's work becomes very visual and very obvious: people in need are really hurting around the holidays. And we structured the emotions of the movie around the relationship between Heidi, a single mom we met during the support groups, and Sue. It is a quiet movie, and it moves slowly with very little music. Our hope is that you might watch it in a quiet, pensive moment, ideally up on a big screen in the dark. And we hope that you think about some of the small moments in the documentary from time to time as a small reminder of how our actions, no matter how small, tie us all together, for better or for worse.
You can watch the film in full at the DDM Films streaming site: https://ddmfilms.vhx.tv/