Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 17, 1994 TAG: 9404170085
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
Folley's broad Virginia cadence narrates "Lillian," an unsentimental semidocumentary about the Richmond woman and the foster children and old people she looks after.
Folley plays herself in the austere character study written and directed by her landlord, David Williams. Actors portray her charges.
Williams, a computer consultant, makes movies as an avocation. "Lillian" is his first feature-length film.
"Everything that you see in that movie, it happened to me," Folley said, seated recently in the same living room where much of the film is set. "Ain't nothing made up."
"Lillian" has played to good reviews at film festivals around the country, winning a Special Jury Award at its debut at the Sundance Film Festival last year.
The film follows the 57-year-old woman through a day that begins at 5 a.m. and does not end until all her charges are asleep.
Lillian cooks breakfast, sends the older children to school, then feeds and bathes the adults and plays with the baby. It is midmorning before she sits to eat her own breakfast. Soon she rises to begin lunch.
The character is heroic, but Williams takes care to leave Lillian's graceful strength unadorned.
"I don't want to be remembered as nothing but what I am and who I am," Lillian declares at the film's outset.
"Lillian" has at its soul an unspoken political truth: The strongest among us rarely are the powerful.
Lillian's circumstances are fragile. She cannot control when the foster children she loves will be taken from her and cannot prevent her fictional landlord from selling the house.
Williams met Folley more than 10 years ago, when Folley lost her previous house and went knocking on doors looking for a new place. Skeptical at first, Folley eventually allowed Williams to make a short film about her family, and then "Lillian."
Williams is planning a third film about Folley's life.
"I told him I don't know why you want to make a movie of me, but he kept after me on it," Folley said. "So now I'm a movie star or something," she said, the end of her words caught in a rolling laugh.
"Everybody who sees it says to me, `Oh, you're just like my grandmother, or my aunt,' or, `Oh, I wish I had a grandma like you.' Well, I wish I did too, but I didn't," Folley said.
Folley's father died young, leaving his wife with nine children in the flat farmland just north of Richmond.
Folley helped with the younger children, then took care of her mother when she became ill.
Folley married in the early 1960s and moved with her husband to New Jersey. She hated it there and suffered three miscarriages before conceiving her only child, Wanda. The husband left when Wanda was 7.
"I always wanted more children, so I started taking in foster kids," Folley said. "I always treat them like they were mine, but I don't spoil a baby. You can ruin a baby spoiling him."
"Lillian" was shot in three weeks for $40,000.
Williams had to work around Folley's real-life duties, shooting for a few hours a day after the morning chores were complete.
She has cared for so many foster children she can no longer count them, but she still remembers every face, she said. In the movie as in real life, sweet mementoes are displayed on a shelf - stuffed toys, school art projects.
Lillian serves as caretaker for people to whom society has broken its promises: Lillian's 12-year-old granddaughter, loved but ultimately abandoned by her parents, foster children and elderly boarders.
"I do think it is pretty terrific what she does," Williams said. "It's her spirit. She doesn't let anyone push her around."
At the moment, Folley has no foster children, and she admits she has enjoyed the rest. Still, "If they called me up and said, `Miss Lillian, we have a baby here,' I'd take him in a minute."
by CNB