About the Documentary

Kitten Jacob has struggled with drug addiction for most of her adult life. Nine years ago, she abandoned her two young sons for weeks, leaving them alone in their apartment to fend for themselves. When food ran out, five-year-old Danny and one-year-old Raymond made a harrowing journey on public transportation and on foot to reach their great-grandmother’s house. The courts declared Kitten an unfit parent and granted custody of the boys to their grandmother, Erslena, who has remained their guardian ever since. Now, at ages 14 and 11, Danny and Raymond are still holding onto the hope that their mother will kick her crack habit, while Kitten worries that her battle with addiction will be a losing one.

Why Can’t We Be a Family Again? begins in 1997, when child welfare authorities warn Kitten that she has one last chance: complete a drug treatment program or lose her parental rights forever. She enrolls in a residential treatment center in upstate New York and appears to be making progress. But she drops out after only four months, returning to drug use and the streets of Brooklyn. After allowing Danny and Raymond to remain in the limbo of kinship foster care for nearly a decade, the Family Court initiates legal procedures to terminate Kitten’s parental rights.

During the past ten years, the brothers have relied on their grandmother for guidance and love. They also have been able to turn to a family support organization, the Center for Family Life. Danny’s jobs as a counselor at the Center’s after-school and summer camp programs have helped build his confidence and given him the chance to be a role model to younger kids, including his brother. The film shows how the Center has become one of the strongest forces in the boys’ lives, keeping them grounded despite the turmoil at home.

Shot over a three-year period, this emotionally wrenching documentary shows how two brothers who were devastated by their mother’s addiction and neglect found a way to thrive–and redefine what it means to be a family. There is no Hollywood ending to this story and no easy solution. But Why Can’t We Be a Family Again? isn’t just a cautionary tale of the dangers of drug abuse. It’s also a testament to human determination and a portrait of a courageous and embattled family.

The Filmmakers

Roger Weisberg
Weisberg joined Thirteen/WNET in 1977 as a producer of the Emmy-winning series Help Yourself. He produced dozens of programs on a broad range of subjects, including aging, domestic violence, juvenile justice, consumer fraud, health care, the environment, child welfare and urban poverty. Since 1980, he has written, produced and directed 22 PBS documentaries through his independent production company, Public Policy Productions. These documentaries have won more than 80 accolades, including Peabody, Emmy and duPont-Columbia awards. Some of Weisberg’s films are vérité-style documentaries with no narration, while others are narrated by prominent actors such as Meryl Streep, Helen Hayes and James Earl Jones, as well as journalists such as Marvin Kalb, Jane Pauley and Walter Cronkite. While all of Weisberg’s documentaries ultimately were broadcast on national public television, his 1993 documentary Road Scholar and his 1999 documentary Sound And Fury had broad theatrical releases before airing on PBS. Weisberg received an Academy Award nomination in 2001 for Sound And Fury and in 2003 for WHY CAN’T WE BE A FAMILY AGAIN? His current productions are Making Work Pay, about the struggles of low-wage workers to lift their families out of poverty, and Aging Out, about teens making the transition from foster care to independent living.

Murray Nossel, Ph.D.
Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Nossel trained and practiced as a clinical psychologist before immigrating to the United States in 1990. His foray into ethnographic filmmaking began in 1994, with a two-year project documenting the stories of persons with AIDS in New York. Nossel is on the teaching faculty of the Columbia University School of Social Work and in 1996 he embarked on an ethnographic inquiry into the Center for Family Life, a family support program in Brooklyn, New York. This research culminated in his doctoral dissertation about the anthropological implications of time in social work practice. In 1997, Nossel teamed up with Roger Weisberg to make a documentary about the Center for Family Life. This collaboration resulted in two films: A Brooklyn Family Tale and WHY CAN’T WE BE A FAMILY AGAIN? Nossel is also producer/director of Paternal Instinct, a vérité documentary to be aired on BBC and HBO which chronicles a gay couple’s efforts to have a child with a surrogate mother. Apart from his role as a documentary filmmaker, Nossel is a founding member of 2 Men Talking, a storytelling performance which deals with issues of harassment, homophobia, anti-Semitism and AIDS. He has performed 2 Men Talking in theatrical settings in the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and Italy. In 2003, 2 Men Talking became part of an initiative to address issues of secrecy in South Africa’s HIV/ AIDS epidemic.

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