“It [love] feels like it’s something everyone can relate to, and so that’s also at the heart of how we want to make movies that open up spaces where there’s more empathy,” said Lalita Clozel, French director and producer of the documentary “Homelessly in Love.” 

As part of the French Connexions’ Francophone Film Festival, Clozel and fellow producer-director Ariane Mohseni-Sadjadi visited WashU for a screening of their breakout documentary and a Q&A session on Oct. 14. 

For nearly five years, the two producer-directors documented the lives of three women experiencing homelessness in the United States. This screening was the film’s American debut. It premiered last November in France. The documentary explores issues such as domestic violence, poverty, and rebuilding one’s life through the lens of love and human connection. It won the Audience Award at the Escales Documentaires in La Rochelle and the Best Documentary Feature award at the Dallas Movie Fest, and it was also selected to be shown at  MyFirstDoc in Tunis and DOK Leipzig. 

“Even though of course we feel that [these women are] struggling throughout the documentary, there’s always that lens of emotion and intimacy that allows, we hope, as many people as possible to feel empathy toward Alyssa, Michelle, and Lorraine,” Clozel said.  

The documentary follows three protagonists — Alyssa, Michelle, and Lorraine — who are living in Washington, D.C. and struggling with housing instability. The three women aren’t asked to talk about their financial situations but rather their love lives. Lorraine and Alyssa both discuss their current relationships, while Michelle opens up about an abusive husband who she recently escaped from. Over the course of the film, each woman overcomes her past and begins to rebuild her life. 

Before this project, neither Clozel nor Mohseni-Sadjadi was a documentarian. Mohseni-Sadjadi was volunteering in Paris homeless shelters when she came up with the subject of “Homelessly in Love.”

“That’s how I got the idea of talking about love, because it really was the subject that everyone in the shelter would talk to me about: feeling lonely. And love not just in the romantic way, but also love as a parent, as a kid, as a brother, a sister,” Mohseni-Sadjadi said. 

Clozel and Mohseni-Sadjadi had been close friends since high school, so they started working on this project together while maintaining their day jobs. When they started shooting, Clozel was pursuing a career in journalism by writing for The Wall Street Journal about financial regulation in Washington, and Mohseni-Sadjadi was working in banking in London after having recently graduated from business school. 

“After we started filming, we got a first grant for the movie, and I think it was what I needed as a push to feel brave enough to quit my job and make documentaries,” Mohseni-Sadjadi said. 

Now, almost a year after the film’s release, Mohseni-Sadjadi and Clozel are back in the United States as Villa Albertine residents in Chicago for three months. Villa Albertine is a cultural institution connected to the French Embassy whose goal is to facilitate exchanges in arts and ideas between the two countries. They offer over 50 customized residencies for international artists, thinkers, and cultural leaders across disciplines. During their residency, Clozel and Mohseni-Sadjadi are working on a new project titled “Désindustries (Discontinued).” The film will explore how deindustrialization has an impact on smaller, rural communities in the U.S. (such as rural Kansas and Missouri) and France. 

The duo was thankful that, during their time in the United States, they were also able to share “Homelessly in Love” with a young American audience at WashU.  

“We were surprised by how many questions the students had,” Clozel said, “particularly … a curiosity about really important subjects like … how homelessness plays out in very practical ways like access to care, and what are some of the biggest difficulties that Alyssa, Michelle, and Lorraine were facing.”