In the heart of a quaint, tree-lined street in Virginia sits a modest light blue bungalow. It’s a small house with a big heart–and a big idea that’s now getting national attention as the subject of a documentary, Guest House.
In 2018, DC area filmmakers Hannah Dweck and Yael Luttwak went to a yoga class in the funky, family friendly neighborhood of Del Ray in Alexandria, Virginia. It wasn’t just an ordinary yoga class. It’s a hidden gem. This suburban home has been in nonstop service to women getting out of prison for the last 45 years. Guest House enables women who’ve been released from prison to have a second chance in their community.
Luttwak and Dweck decided to dig deeper. What followed was a year of filming and Guest House, a documentary. The film opened at Hot Springs and Austin Film Festivals in November, and premiered in Washington DC to an audience of more than 600 people on January 30, 2020 at Sixth & I.
Guest House is an honest portrait of three young women trying to regain trust from the community, and trust in themselves. Grace, Maddison and Selena arrive at Friends of Guest House just after being released from prison. All of them served time for nonviolent offenses, all were in jail for opioids, and they had all been in prison before. Through strict rules along with art therapy, group sessions and shared house duties, they develop genuine friendships and the promise of a better future.
Driven, witty and candid, the women reveal the contours of their hopes and dreams.
This empathetic portrait, filmed over an eventful year, exposes what it takes to overcome addiction, stigma and systematic injustices of a broken system. Dweck and Luttwak filmed their documentary against a backdrop crisis of opioid addiction and prison overcrowding. Today, twice as many women as men are being imprisoned for non-violent offenses due to the opioids. Low-income women are more vulnerable because they lack the resources to get help.
To make the film, Dweck and Luttwak had full access to Friends of Guest House. This residential program in Alexandria was one of the first of its kind in the U.S. and is distinctive for its focus on women. Founded 45 years ago, Friends of Guest House has been in continual operation in its residential home in Northern Virginia. The program receives more than 400 applications a year for 60 spots. This year, Friends of Guest House opened a second center in Old Town–a circa 1811 former office building recently converted back into a home. The new center welcomed its first residents in October.
Silverbee landed the honor of being the documentary’s public and media relations team, representing Guest House and the filmmakers to the media, orchestrating interviews, Q&As, photos and event support for the film’s debut. For the DC opening, the team appeared on NBC Washington, the Fox 5 morning show, and WAMU 88.5FM Public Radio. Maddison and Selena gave many hours to preparing for the interviews and fitting them into their work schedules. After the DC show, admirers clustered around the women, and through it all, they handled it all like total pros. It feels good to be part of this team, supporting the filmmakers and women in working to demonstrate a real, workable solution to drug addiction and prison overcrowding — two of the most difficult problems in our country today.