Jane Gillooly

TODAY THE HAWK TAKES ONE CHICK (2008) Director: Jane Gillooly

✰✰✰1/2 THE BOSTON GLOBE
In "Today the Hawk Takes One Chick," Cambridge-based filmmaker Jane Gillooly focuses a still, clear lens on a tiny corner of Africa's AIDS crisis and in so doing illuminates the whole. The documentary is heartbreaking but in none of the obvious ways; rather than disease per se, the subject is
the vast and wrenching social consequences of epidemic. The Boston Globe (read full review)

FILM & REALITY
Balancing a commitment to emotional authenticity and a sensorial, textural style driven by striking images, sounds, and a musical approach to editing, Gillooly’s work continues to surprise as she crosses new boundaries and confronts new subjects with her distinctive vision.
FILM & REALITY_ Peter Dowd (read full review)

✰✰✰1/2 THE BOSTON PHOENIX
Gillooly and Slater strive to match the grandmothers in being unsentimental in the face of dying and death. They show what is, without voiceover commentary, leaving it to the horrified audience to figure out what to do. Boston Phoenix (read full review)

AFTERIMAGE MAGAZINE
There is a quiet strength to the observant style Gillooly has adopted for the film. Without voice-over narration directing viewers through the work, its structure is elliptical and expressive. With starkly evocative details punctuating the film, the tone is solemn rather than declarative. Viewers are left with impressions rather than explanations or judgment. (read full review)

“beautiful and wonderfully crafted, its importance pours out”
-- Ryan Haidarian
Head of Development & Production
National Film and Video Foundation - South Africa
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This is a poignant and beautifully perceptive portrait of three extraordinarily dynamic grandmothers (gogos), resolutely holding their families together in the wake of the Swaziland Aids crisis. Director Jane Gillooly's respect for her film's subjects, her sensitive camera and seamless editing create a delicate balance between the culturally specific aspects of the gogos' lives and the universality of their tragedies.
--Ilisa Barbash
Associate Curator, Visual Anthropology
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology
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In Swaziland, the circle of life has been turned on its head. Grandmothers – or Gogo, as they are called in SiSwati and many southern African languages – watch their adult children die of AIDS and are forced to raise their many grandchildren on their own.

Great documentaries have the power to personalize seemingly incomprehensible world issues, breaking barriers of distance and language to present the human condition across cultures. Few achieve that feat as well as Jane Gillooly’s Today the Hawk Takes One Chick, which presents the stories of three African Gogos living in a society at the threshold of simultaneous collapse and reinvention, organizing into communities at an age when they expected that their adult children would be taking care of them.

Gillooly’s direction shines light on the individual suffering and perseverance of those afflicted by AIDS. For 73 minutes, Gillooly’s work invites the audience to live in world where HIV affects everyone, and forces us to ponder the fate of its people. The cinematography and sound recording is sensitive, observant, and mesmerizing; we feel drawn in as participants, overwhelmed and inspired by the challenges the Gogos’ face, with not enough support.

And so this documentary film was made to support the Gogo Project, a consortium of international aid organizations working to provide seeds and fertilizers for gardens, shoes and school uniforms for the children, and profitable trade skills to the Gogo so that they can support their expanding households.

-- Richard Herskowitz, Film Programmer
Creative Director Virginia Film Festival