It's hard to know how to come up with 600 words to say about this truly compassionate and honest work.
Life is pain. Pain is passed from one generation to the next.
We love and we are selfish. We are chained by the past and, sometimes, we struggle nobly against it, despite all of our flaws and limitations.
Streetwise and Tiny: The Life of Erin Blackwell should be used, in tandem, as a introduction to the complexities of social work and of human behavior more broadly. The two films tell the whole tale.
Are we entirely products of our conditioning (i.e. Without responsibility or culpability)?
No.
Do we have genuine free will-- and can we defy our conditioning opt out of intergenerational trauma?
Also, no.
Is this an irreconcilable paradox? Maybe. But what more can we say?
Blessings to Erin, her family, the filmmakers, and everyone involved in the making of these films.