Urban Matters: First, let me say how much I admire what you achieved in Through the Night, which the Center for New York City Affairs will be screening at the New School on May 20th. It’s a perceptive, moving film about the round-the-clock loving care Dee’s Tots Childcare gives children of hard-working families in New Rochelle. How did you come to Dee’s as a story you wanted to tell?

Loira Limbal: I read about Dee's in an online mothers' group I belong to, and the article stopped me cold. I knew the families it described. My mother is a Dominican immigrant who worked nights as a home health aide. She was a single parent. She did not have paid time off and could not call in sick. I remember how hard it was for her to patch together childcare. That is a story working-class women, particularly Black, Brown, and immigrant women, across this country still recognize.

I wanted to make a film about love — the love between Black and Latina mothers, providers, and children inside a system that gives them almost nothing to work with. Deloris ‘Nunu’ (pictured above) and Patrick Hogan opened their home to me for two years. They let me sit at their kitchen table late into the night when a parent's shift ran late. They trusted me with their everyday lives and the lives of the families in their care. Through the Night exists because of that trust.

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UM:  You deftly show the ceaseless work Deloris and Patrick do – the endless rounds of clean up, food preparation, and paperwork, the punishingly long hours. You also provide glimpses of the difficult work lives of Dee’s Tots' parents. What message does Through the Night convey about what they all face?

Limbal: The film asks viewers to feel something they have been trained not to see. The mothers in the film are working overnight shifts at hospitals, holding down three jobs, doing what working families have always done in this country, and getting punished for it. Nunu is awake feeding babies, folding laundry, doing the paperwork the State requires when many other small business owners are asleep.

The cost of childcare for a young child rivals the cost of rent in most U.S. cities. But after paying their expenses, family child care providers -- women doing the work in their own homes -- are paid almost nothing for it. This is the labor that makes everything else in our economy possible. Hospitals run because someone is up with the children of the night nurses. Grocery stores open because someone is feeding breakfast to the children of the stockers. None of it works without the providers in this film, and we have built a country that pretends not to know that.

I wanted viewers to really see that care in action. Nunu loves the children in her care. The mothers love their children fiercely. Through the Night is, finally, a film about what love looks like when the country won't help.

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UM: Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s election propelled demands for universal free childcare to the top of the policy agenda in New York City and State. Family daycare operators like Dee and Patrick are going to be a big part of any expanding daycare system. Based on what you learned making Through the Night, what should policymakers do to help them do their demanding, important work?

Limbal: Universal has to actually be universal. I’m buoyed by the movement spearheaded by Mayor Mamdani.  It’s one more example of this administration’s commitment to workers. That said, most home-based providers are on the outside of the setup of the 2-K implementation plan. A few things have to change for that to be different.

First, the Family Child Care Network bottleneck. To contract with the city's Education Department, a home-based provider has to be part of a City-funded network, and according to the Center for New York City Affairs' recent report only about 20 percent of the city's roughly 6,500 home-based operators are. Eighty percent are bureaucratically locked out. That has to be fixed.

Second, the same research found that home-based providers' average extended-day contract paid roughly $17,000 per child last year, compared to more than $27,000 per child for center-based contracts. We need reimbursement parity.

Third, hours. Universal cannot mean only weekday daytime hours. Parents work overnight shifts, weekend shifts, and double shifts. Round-the-clock care has to be inside the definition.

Providers are organizing on these fronts. The question is whether the City’s plan will include them or build around them.

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UM: It’s been a few years since you made Through the Night. Deloris will be with you when the Center for New York City Affairs screens the film. We learn so much about this capable, big-hearted woman in the film; would it be a plot spoiler to ask if Dee’s Tots is still a going concern?

Limbal: Nunu is indeed still doing the work. More than two decades of it now. Watching the film today, knowing she is still at it, is its own kind of testimony.

I am so glad she, along with hundreds of providers, will be with us on May 20. This screening is also a celebratory moment. The conversation that night will include Shanita Bowen of ECE on the Move, who organizes alongside more than 600 home-based providers across New York City; Reshma Saujani of Moms First; and Jaime-Jin Lewis of Wiggle Room. Each of them brings something necessary. But Nunu and the providers are the center of the room.

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UM: Final question. Since making Through the Night, you’ve become president and CEO of Firelight Media, a nonprofit supporting the work of documentary filmmakers of color. What are your plans going forward?

Limbal: Firelight Media has spent over 25 years supporting Black, Brown, and Indigenous documentary filmmakers whose stories this country has not always been ready or able to hear. My plan is to deepen that work. Last fall, we launched the Firelight Fund to make unrestricted grants to support filmmakers directly. We are fundraising to grow our Documentary Lab. And we are sharpening our argument about why this work matters. Especially as we mark America@250 this July, our work is a record of American life that certain people would prefer did not exist.

Through the Night is part of a lineage of documentary work about care, about labor, about women of color. That lineage will keep growing because filmmakers are out there doing the work. Our job is to make sure they have what they need to make it, and to reach the people who need to see it.

The conversation New York is having right now about who deserves care, and who does the caring, would be much narrower without films like Through the Night. The filmmakers we support are insisting on a fuller record. That insistence has never been more necessary.