TV Review : An Evening of Outrage and Poverty on ‘P.O.V.’

The linkage of Pamela Yates and Peter Kinoy’s “Takeover” with Anne Lewis Johnson’s “Fast Food Women” on “P.O.V.” (at 10 tonight on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15) makes for 90 minutes of quietly building outrage. Despite their disparate subjects--self-organizing homeless people and women stuck in minimum-wage jobs, respectively--they share the investigative filmmaker’s mission to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

“Takeover” may become, with time, a historical document of a grass-roots movement defying the odds. Aided with grants from Bruce Springsteen and filmmaker Michael Moore, Yates and Kinoy assembled 12 film units in eight cities to record a nationwide takeover of vacant houses by homeless people on May 1, 1990.

The action arose from a written promise by Housing and Urban Development secretary Jack Kemp to provide the homeless with 10% of HUD-owned housing--homes and apartments repossesed after the original owners defaulted on loans. New York homeless activist Casanova and others soon realized that Kemp’s promise wasn’t being fulfilled. Mothers no longer wanted to subject their children to the streets or drug-infested tenements. Desperate conditions required desperate measures.

Cutting between actions in Philadelphia (where an upscale home is occupied), Minneapolis, Tucson, Detroit, New York--though with strangely little attention to Los Angeles--Yates and Kinoy build up a pressure that conventional filmmaking could never suggest. What propels this movement is the simple idea that some laws must be broken in order to be changed. Still, although the film shows homeless coalition successes since 1990, housing laws have not been changed, and you wonder if these people can stay the course until they are.

Ironically, while homeless are on the move, the “Fast Food Women” seem impossibly trapped. Johnson focuses on the poor Cumberlands region of Kentucky, where thousands of male miners have been laid off from high-wage, high-benefit work, forcing their wives and daughters to settle for any kind of work at all.

This often means cooking and serving at fast-food restaurants like Pizza Hut, McDonald’s and Druthers. (And, of course, Kentucky Fried Chicken.) Fast-food industry critic Barbara Garson offers trenchant comments on how short-order cooking has been turned into robotic activity by companies concerned with mass production, but the real impact here is in the tired faces, the oil-scorched arms and the sweaty brows of women earning as little as $2.05 per hour.