Filmmaker dislikes 'poverty porn'

Steve Patrick Ercolani's 'Pyne Poynt' documentary looks at Camden through the eyes of young baseball players.

The filmmaker says the North Camden Little League provides a better perspective on city life than the sort of media coverage he characterized as "poverty porn" in a recent essay for the UK's Guardian newspaper.

The media have "a fundamental inability to accurately depict the lives of America's urban poor," writes Ercolani, 27, of Haddonfield, who is working on the documentary with Baltimore filmmaker Gabe Dinsmoor. Much of the coverage adheres to a lurid cops-n-robbers narrative that leaves little room for the voices of ordinary people who call the city home, Ercolani adds.

The filmmakers interviewed a group of North Camden kids talking about a recent Rolling Stone story by Matt Taibbi that portrayed the city as a ruined war zone inhabited almost exclusively by high-tech cops and cartoon criminals. A less testosterone-soaked but still one-dimensional special report by NBC's Brian Williams in 2013 also mystified the youngsters.

"The kids don't view themselves as living in this Third World country," Ercolani says. "They're confused by the descriptions in the media. Listening to them is powerful."

'Pyne Poynt' will run 90 minutes and should be completed in July.

--KEVIN RIORDAN