This week’s Sundance Film Festival premiere of the documentary To Catch a Dollar: Muhammad Yunus Banks on America about the first women recipients of Grameen America bank’s microloans is important not just for its stories about low-income Queens residents but for the themes it discusses in advance of the opening of the San Francisco branch.
Read more on the Huffington Post Impact story or continue on TheSanFranista.
I was fortunate to interview producer/director/cinematographer Gayle Ferraro (whose first film Sixteen Decisions followed the story of a borrower in Bangladesh, where the bank first began operating in 1976) along with Danae Ringlemann, and you can see that conversation and one with Grameen founder Dr. Muhammad Yunus on her IndieGoGo company site.
His bank has managed to focus on the latter while expanding, but its introduction to the United States hasn’t been a seamless one. A young Grameen employee who advises groups of five borrowers in Jackson Heights–and whose simultaneous patience and frustration are the focus of much of the film–finds that her clients are less likely to be engaged with weekly group meetings than their Bangladeshi counterparts. Her expression of joking concern when she reads from a bank manual about livestock trading value (when the women she’s working with primarily work in clothing and hair extension sale) provides calm as the bank struggles to earn $6 million to set up a legal banking structure in the States, largely through Yunus’ nearly-constant speaking engagements.
It’s a lesson that is deftly presented in director Gerraro’s hands. Even after spending months capturing borrowers’ experiences and hardships in Grameen’s original country, it took her nearly two years and 400 hours of shooting Yunus’ outreach efforts to convince him to allow the bank’s expansion to be made into a feature film. His ultimate acceptance, along with grants from the Skoll Foundation and Sundance and news of the crash of the global finance system, allowed her to do so. The result of her perseverance—especially in trying to finance an independent film—is a thought-provoking look at Grameen America’s efforts to help thousands of women find financial stability for themselves and their families, and entrepreneurial mothers aren’t the only ones who stand to gain.