Arielle Holmes - Mad Love in NYC

Ten years ago, Arielle Holmes was working as a dominatrix named Siouxsie at a club called Pandora’s Box. After she finished her shift she’d sleep in a doorway or park bench, then, when morning dawned, supplement her income by panhandling on New York’s Upper West Side..

One day, she was stopped by a man as she went into the subway. He was researching a movie, he said, and asked her if she might want to be in it. “I figured: what do I have to lose? I looked him up. He made movies. So I thought, you know, maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t.”

As they became friends, Holmes opened up about being homeless, her drug habit, her destructive relationship with another addict, Ilya, and her troubled upbringing. The director – Josh Safdie, part of an acclaimed Manhattan collective – encouraged Holmes to write about her experiences. She did, and her candid recollections – soon to be published as a memoir, Mad Love in New York City - convinced him to abandon the project he was working on and instead shoot a movie based on her life-story. Starring her.

It's a story of strength, life and survival through epically bad times.