Begging Naked.
No other film so vividly documents one woman's descent into the hell of mental illness and homelessness as Begging Naked.
What started as a quirky interview of a struggling artist turned into a heartbreaking odyssey spanning a decade as Karen Gehres documented her friend's disintegration. Fifteen-year-old runaway Elise Hill crossed the George Washington Bridge intoNew York City and walked into a world of addiction and prostitution. Miraculously,Elise turned her life around and fulfilled her life-long dreams to study art. She supported herself by working as a jewelry maker and artist for the next fifteen years.
As the stress of being a street vendor began to compound, Elise decided to return to the sex industry as a stripper in 1994. Attempting to integrate dancing with her art, Elise brought her easel up on stage as part of her act and painted her fellow dancers and customers.
When Guiliani's Disneyfication of Times Square shut down the various midtown strip clubs, the wages of strippers plummeted, leaving many of them destitute. After years outside the job market, Elise is unable to adapt in the working world. Unable to pay her rent, her landlord begins eviction proceedings. She attends court hearings staving off eviction for a time, but in July 2001 we witness her final eviction from her home of 20 years.
From her first night sleeping on the sidewalk in front of St. Thomas' Church, Begging Naked documents Elise’s decline, her frightening conflict of identity and her day-to-day struggle for food and shelter. By Fall of 2003, we see Elise living in Central Park. At the age of 41, despite everything she is still creating art, weaving baskets out of telephone wire and assembling clothes from donated materials.This is a story of survival and self-undoing. Against an unforgiving backdrop of homelessness and madness, Begging Naked shows the endurance of the human spirit at its most extreme.
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“Thanks for the film. Really devastating and well made. Congrats on a successful film.”
— Martin Scorsese
“Fascinating observations about art, the sex industry and the road to homelessness....An amazing documentary about an extraordinary person.”
— Roger Ebert
What People are Saying !
Her friend through thick and thin
By Staff Writer
Begging Naked' documentarian Karen Gehres began taping her pal Elise Hill for a video biography, she didn't know what troubles were ahead. Her name is Elise Hill. She is in her 40s and has been homeless since 2001. She spends her days in New York City's Central Park and her nights on the sidewalks.
A onetime heroin addict who worked as a stripper and prostitute, she is also an accomplished painter, sculptor and maker of costume jewelry who was evicted from the home she had known for two decades -- above an elevator shaft in a converted maids' quarters on the roof of an upscale building in Midtown Manhattan. The rooftop was her artist's loft. Her poignant story is captured in a feature-length documentary titled "Begging Naked," by director and writer Karen Gehres, who spent nine years chronicling Elise's story, beginning with her friend's love of painting, to her work in a brothel catering to well-heeled clients, including members of the United Nations, to her gradual descent into paranoia and mental illness. "It's been horrible; it's been horrendous," Gehres said in a recent phone call from New York, reflecting on the emotional toll a decade of filming Elise has taken on her. Many times, Gehres said, she wanted to stop. But "I didn't know how it was going to end," she explained. "Every time I thought it was over, it wasn't over." When she proposed finding a place for Elise to stay, she was met with resistance.
"She has all these conditions on everything, or paranoia about going anywhere," Gehres said. "If I had money to put her in a place where she didn't have to pay rent, I would love to do that. That's a goal. Just get her out of there." But Elise would claim "either the mob is after her, or the CIA is after her." The documentary will be shown Sunday night at the ArcLight in Hollywood as part of the 11th annual Hollywood Film Festival. Carlos de Abreu, the festival's founder and executive director, said "Begging Naked" is part of this year's festival theme of "giving voice to the voiceless." Gehres said that every place "Begging" screens, people ask if they can purchase Elise Hill's arresting artwork. The director said she has put her friend's paintings into storage, selling only a few pieces to provide Elise with enough cash to live on. "She doesn't trust banks," said Gehres, adding that she is reluctant to sell many more paintings, believing that in time the art world will discover Elise's talent and the prices could soar, allowing her friend to get off the streets forever. A freelance field producer, Gehres met Elise in 1989. Both were painters, and Gehres was working in an art supply shop. "Elise walked into the store where I was working. We just started talking. We just clicked. She was bright and funny and talented. But she decided to go back to stripping, and I was really upset."
Gehres didn't start shooting her film until 1996. She was taking video arts classes at the time and had access to a camera. Elise told her, "Come on up and practice on me. I'll never write my autobiography, but we can at least get it on tape." Elise was living a block from Carnegie Hall inside an apartment building. "Basically, she lived on the roof above the elevator shaft," Gehres said. "It was very long and narrow. It kind of felt like a boat. She carved out these little round windows herself because there were no windows. She lived there 20 years."
Elise came from an upper-middle-class family in New Jersey. Why she left home is a bit unclear, but Elise talks on film about a fight she had with her dad. "She landed in New York -- literally walked over the George Washington Bridge, walked downtown to Union Square Park, which had the nickname 'Needle Park' back then," Gehres said. "It was filled with pimps and heroin pushers. She was young, just a teenager. She met a guy and got hooked on heroin."
Gehres said Elise went into rehab and weaned herself off heroin, but she kept working the streets. Her ”Elise came from an upper-middle-class family in New Jersey. Why she left home is a bit unclear, but Elise talks on film about a fight she had with her dad. "She landed in New York -- literally walked over the George Washington Bridge, walked downtown to Union Square Park, which had the nickname 'Needle Park' back then," Gehres said. "It was filled with pimps and heroin pushers. She was young, just a teenager. She met a guy and got hooked on heroin." Gehres said Elise went into rehab and weaned herself off heroin, but she kept working the streets. Her descent into mental illness occurred gradually. "She said the only time that she was ever medicated for anything was when she was in rehab," Gehres recalled. "That is when she was 17 or 18 years old. When the paranoia kicked in full force, she stopped paying rent. The guy she was renting that place from -- that little shaft -- had had enough." One of the most painful scenes is the day of Elise's eviction, when she wraps herself with layers of clothing, puts her cat into a carrier and struggles with her belongings on the sidewalk.
Elise can be found most days at Central Park's boathouse. Despite Elise's plight, Gehres is hopeful for her friend's future. "Knowing Elise, anything could happen."
Ebertfest 2009: Day Three Posted in Film
By Hank Sartin on April 25th, 2009
Finally, the first film of the day: a doc without distribution that Roger Ebert got unsolicited from a reader (not from the director of the film, by the way) called Begging Naked. Roger watched the DVD and immediately contacted director Karen Gehres. The film is a portrait of Gehres’s friend Elise Hill, an artist who has also worked in the sex industry, both as an exotic dancer and as a prostitute. Over the course of nine years, Gehres kept filming her friend in interviews and in daily life. And in those nine years, Hill became homeless and descended into untreated mental illness, imaging that the KGB and/or the CIA was tracking her movements.
It’s an unflinching look at how people on the margins can slide from precarious stability to desperation, a topic that recurs in the fest with Trouble the Water and Frozen River. It’s a powerful doc and raises questions about the responsibilities of filmmakers to their subjects. Only in the Q&A with Gehres did it become clear how much Gehres has been engaged in Hill’s life, going to eviction hearings with her, paying to store Hill’s art when it was going to be thrown out by Hill’s former landlord, trying to get Hill to seek some psychiatric help or get out of Central Park and into a shelter. So, powerful stuff in the film and another powerful story around the film.