Documentary focuses on Long Island families.

by: Rafer Guzman

Partway through the documentary "Hard Times: Lost on Long Island," director Marc Levin captures some fairly surreal moments in which the Suffolk County sheriffs forcibly evict people from their homes. 

What's odd is not the action, which is sadly familiar, but the settings: pretty trees, green lawns, clean, wide streets.  The message is clear:  The recession isn't hitting only the poor but the average, even well-off, American.

"Hard Times," is an HBO documentary that plays today and tomorrow at the Hamptons International Film Festival, monitors the effects of the economic downturn on several Long Islanders.  They are white-collar, well-educated people with nice homes and six-figure incomes, though their lives changed dramatically when the economy began to crater in 2008.

"It's following the slow-motion disintegration of their lives and, in a way, the whole American middle-class dream," says Levin, a part-time Amagansett resident.  "And we chose Long Island because it is the birthplace of the postwar suburban good life."

Among those profiled in the film are Alan Fromm, a corporate trainer from Plainview; Anne Strauss, a public relations professional in Smithtown; Nick Puccio, a former securities lending trader from Wantagh; and Dave and Heather Hartstein, a Montauk couple with three children.  The subjects endure some difficult moments on camera: job-hunting, rejections, foreclosure notices.

"The reason I decided to do it was because the story needed to be told," says Strauss, who plans to attend today's screening.  "People in the U.S. are suffering.  They're hungry, and they're in many ways worse off than my husband and myself.  And that awaremess has to be brought to mind."

The film's soundtrack includes periodic chatter from talk-show hosts who blast the unemployed as lazy moochers.

"Go out and get a job, work at McDonald's!" one yells.  Fromm, it turns out, applied to FedEx, thinking he could at least drive a truck, but was turned down as "overqualified."

"There might be some people who'll say, 'They had a good run, I'm not going to feel sorry for them,'" says Levin.  "But it goes to the core of the essential question that we as Americans face now.  If we can't provide that promise that Long Island has always held, that promise of shared prosperity - if all that is going to disappear, what have we got?"