Vidalia McLoud: a family story

Documentary portrait of a family of Black Americans in a migrant town in central Florida. The focus of the program is Vidalia McCloud, a 30-year-old single mother raising three young sons. The program is divided into 7 sections, spans three years in Vidalia’s life, and has the feeling of a diary or autobiography. Through vérité-style scenes and personal interview-statements from Vidalia, the viewer experiences many events of her daily life and struggle: picking fruit in Upstate New York, working as a short-order cook, coping with one son’s problems in school, falling in love and marrying. Her brother, her sons, and new husband are also represented in the program, giving the viewer a felling for the family relationships.This program is very important – and has already elicited very positive reactions from a wide range of viewers – because it deals, with intimacy and subtlety, with a complex subject of growing seriousness in America: the growing number of Black women who become pregnant in their teens and raise their children in poverty without men involved as fathers or joint breadwinners.