Community Corner

HBO to Premiere "Hard Times: Lost On Long Island"

LI Cares in Hauppauge helped facilitate filming of documentary follows several Long Island families affected by unemployment and the recession.

 

The plight of several Long Island families struggling with the economic downturn will takes tot he big screen on HBO Monday night. 

HBO will premiere the documentary "Hard Times: Lost on Long Island" at 9 p.m. Monday. The film chronicles the struggles of local families who are struggling with unemployment, the aftermath of housing foreclosures and more in suburbia. 

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a Hauppauge-based food bank, played a behind-the-scenes roll in helping the HBO movie come together. The nonprofit organization kept an open dialogue with the documentary's producers as well as reaching out to help several of the individuals and families who will appear in the documentary. 

Paule Pachter, executive director of LI Cares, said the film will highlight that as unemployment hovers around 7 percent on Long Island, it will have a negative impact on the local economy for years to come. 

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"Long Island is clearly at a new crossroads, and unfortunately they are paved with despair and hopelessness for too many who have sought a better life in Nassau and Suffolk. The Long Island of the 1950s is long gone, but what will the Long Island of the 21st century look like?," Pachter said in a statement. 

Huffington Post reports producers Daphne Pinkerson and Marc Levin make the claim the documentary combats the stereotype that the unemployed are lazy. It's their third movie in a set of films focused on labor issues, white the previous two focusing on the decline of New York City's garment industry and and a viewpoint on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911. 


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