Through the Night director and producer Loira Limbal learns the film has won a 2022 duPont-Columbia Award.
Subscribe on iTunes | Listen on Soundcloud
“I felt like I don't have to tell you how brutal racial capitalism is in the United States if I am showing you. I wanted capitalism to indict itself in the film.”
--- director and producer Loira Limbal
In this episode of the On Assignment podcast, Limbal tells the duPont Awards Director Lisa R. Cohen about her love letter to the mothers of Dee’s Tots, a 24/7 daycare that caregiver Deloris “Nunu” Hogan has run out of home for over two decades. Viewed from the inside, Limbal sheds light on the emotional and logistical struggles of single mothers working to make ends meet, and the burdens placed on caregivers in modern America.
In the interview, Limbal explains that she gravitated towards the story of Dee’s Tots because of her own experiences as a child of a single, working mother of color, and as a working mom herself. Maintaining the thread of that shared experience between the film’s subjects and the film crew was important to Limbal; she composed her crew of people of color who were working parents themselves.
“Everyone approached the protagonists, the children, the space, with a lot of love, a lot of respect, a lot of care,” Limbal told Cohen.
Limbal also details how the publicity of the film affected its central character, Hogan, who has gained a platform to publicly push for childcare provider support from the New York state legislature. In August 2021, Hogan wrote a Daily Beast article about her frustrations as a caregiver in the time of COVID.
This empowerment to rewrite the story about caregivers in America is exactly what Limbal aimed for when she set out to produce the film.
“My hope as a filmmaker is to create stories that give us…people of color, new ways to see ourselves that are not loaded with all the sort of negative and problematic baggage that the mainstream has always portrayed us with,” Limbal said.
Watch Through the Night on Amazon.