On an overcast morning in April, Bianca Giaever was anxiously loitering outside the Union Square subway station. She scanned the New Yorkers rushing along on their weekday commutes and tried to psych herself up to go talk to them.
She was dressed rather noticeably, and perhaps slightly humiliatingly, in a red jumpsuit and a white sandwich board she had assembled the night before, writing the words “FREE HELP” in red marker.
It was the first day of a project by Ms. Giaever, 34, a filmmaker and radio producer whose work, inspired by performance artists like Sophie Calle and Tehching Hsieh, often involves personal journeys and interactions with strangers. She planned to offer no-strings-attached assistance to whomever she could, for about a month or so. No ask would be too small, thankless or absurd — “ANYTHING! (Except sex!)” she noted wryly on the business cards she printed up.
While seemingly straightforward, her mission had already opened up plenty of room for uncertainty. Would the strangers in this supposedly cold and impersonal city accept her help? And if they did, how much could she really help them? Over the course of the four days I spent with Ms. Giaever, things would get more complicated. But at the moment, she was focused only on finding her first client.
“Partly the motivation is not feeling helpful in my day-to-day life,” Ms. Giaever told me as she made a lap through Union Square. Helping people, she said, was not her natural instinct: “I feel guilty about that. So I feel like I needed a project to push me to be more generous.”
At first, most passers-by ignored her. A few smirked or snapped furtive photos with their phones. That may have been because of the sandwich board — or because of the small camera crew following her around to document the project.
An hour in, Ms. Giaever had helped four Xavier High School teenagers who were shooting a student movie (she played the role of interviewer) and a 25-year-old single mother of two young daughters, whom Ms. Giaever babysat for 15 minutes while the camera rolled. But the mother, who said she was currently unhoused, became uneasy when asked to sign a release form for Ms. Giaever’s film. Apologizing, she declined.
Ms. Giaever had better luck with Miky Poch, 17, a student from Professional Performing Arts High School, who was seeking romantic advice. Ms. Poch said she dumped her girlfriend last year for a “hot girl summer.” Now she wanted to win her back.
“Why don’t you just lay it all out there?” Ms. Giaever suggested. “Write her a letter and say: ‘I want to get back together, and I will wait until this date. And then if I don’t hear back from you by this date, I’m going to move on.’”
“Actually that’s a really good idea,” Ms. Poch said. “I never put any risk out there for her. So it’s a risk for me.”
After noting the possibility of rejection, Ms. Giaever pressed her new client to nail down some specifics. “OK, so how are you going to tell her?” she asked.
“Probably a letter,” Ms. Poch replied. “I write music, and I produce songs, so I can always release a song about her.”
“If you need any help with the backup instruments or anything, I’m happy to help you,” Ms. Giaever said. She handed her a card.
Ms. Giaever was buoyed by her apparent success, but she wanted to go deeper with her clients. “I haven’t honed in on exactly what the theme is I’m talking to people about,” she said. “Is it their relationship to service? I mainly just want to know, like, legitimately, what their biggest struggles are in their lives.”
The Wall
She was only a few days into the project, but that Friday, Ms. Giaever took a break from Union Square to make good on a favor she had promised the filmmaker Caveh Zahedi, a friend and mentor. Technically, it was part of the project because she was offering him her free labor. Mr. Zahedi had asked her to come over to his small south Brooklyn apartment to paint a fleur-de-lis pattern on a wall in the kitchen.
Things got off to a rocky start. Ms. Giaever, her film crew, Mr. Zahedi and his 12-year-old daughter, Scarlett, couldn’t quite agree on where to place the designs or what colors to use.
On one wall, Mr. Zahedi had taped a few dozen paint swatches from Benjamin Moore, with the store’s name, logo and other details at the bottom of each swatch.
“I don’t like the words,” Ms. Giaever said. She suggested cutting off the swatch bottoms.
Mr. Zahedi laughed. “Are you trying to help?” he asked. “Or are you trying to make it your own?”
“So you’re not asking for my interior design opinions,” Ms. Giaever said, summing it up. “You’re just asking me to execute.”
“Yes.”
“Understood.”
Thirty minutes later, Mr. Zahedi’s Roman gray wall was decorated with a row of wonky, half-smudged fleur-de-lis. As the crew refined their technique, each successive fleur-de-lis less wonky and smudged, Scarlett, alarmed by the powerful fumes coming from cans of gold spray paint, piled on KN95 masks.
“I have so many mixed feelings,” Mr. Zahedi said. “Remorse. Regret. Joy. Gratitude.”
At last, the job was complete: seven rows of gold spray-painted fleur-de-lis, and a single, lightly smeared emblem on the front door. Mr. Zahedi described the look as “I imagine, like, a villa in Venice.”
For the camera, Ms. Giaever asked Mr. Zahedi what he thought of her project. “I think helping others is the center of life,” he said. He said he thought “Free Help” was “trying to explore the center, which is good.”
Ms. Giaever asked him to “rate your customer satisfaction on a scale from 1 to 10.”
“Well, just in terms of coolness and kindness, 10,” Mr. Zahedi answered. “In terms of design, perfection? Three.”
That night, however, he texted her an amendment. “I really love the wall,” he said. “It took a while but it is growing on me.”
The Heckler
After her afternoon with Mr. Zahedi, it began to dawn on Ms. Giaever that some people might question whether her desire to help was more self-serving than it was genuine, particularly with her film crew in tow. Back in Union Square, Ms. Giaever found herself tailed by a young man in a hoodie with an aggrieved expression.
“You have to gain attention to help people?” the man called out. “There’s a shelter two blocks down. There’s a lot of people who need help right there. You really want to help people, you don’t need a sign that says ‘FREE HELP.’”
The distressed young man claimed to have seen, just that morning, the gruesome sight of two people killed by a subway train.
“His critique — your help is not altruistic because you’re doing this to make a film — is true,” Ms. Giaever admitted a few blocks away at a Mediterranean restaurant, where the crew sat down for lunch.
Her father, who lives in Seattle, where she grew up, had raised a similar point. “That’s exactly what my dad is like: ‘You’re drawing unnecessary attention to yourself. Just go volunteer like a normal person,’” she said. “He keeps sending me photos because he volunteered somewhere this morning, and he was like, ‘Gave some free help.’”
She said she had already tried to help several unhoused people in Union Square, but she was going to heed the heckler’s note, and go to Paul’s Place, a homeless shelter on 14th Street.
Still, Ms. Giaever remained undeterred from her original vision for the project. And she found that even within its constraints, she could get close to the raw material of another person’s life. But the closer she got, the more enormous their need for help became and meager her offerings seemed.
One day in Union Square, she was approached by an unemployed and undocumented 24-year-old young man from Ivory Coast who required an interpreter. So Ms. Giaever posted a note on Instagram, looking for a French speaker. Yadir Lakehal, 29, a scientist from Morocco, got wind of the request — his friend had seen Ms. Giaever and her sign on the train and mentioned it to him.
A few days later, at an outdoor table near Bryant Park, with Mr. Lakehal’s assistance, Ms. Giaever helped the undocumented man post a “service offered” listing on Craigslist. The three waded through a job-seeker questionnaire on the app TaskRabbit.
“Ask if he has any gardening experience,” Ms. Giaever said, reading aloud from the site. “One of the skills is ‘waiting in line.’”
When Mr. Lakehal translated it to the young man, he chuckled and covered his face with his hands.
“Why’s he laughing?” she asked.
“He’s, like, surprised that this is a thing,” Mr. Lakehal explained.
Ms. Giaever made plans to accompany her new client to a nonprofit program she had researched called African Communities Together, in Harlem, and offered him ad hoc English lessons.
After they parted, Ms. Giaever opened her MacBook to reveal her desktop background, the title screen of the 1985 film “Sherman’s March: A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation” by Ross McElwee. “Free Help,” she said half-jokingly, was her own “meditation on the possibility of service in New York City during an era of staggering inequality and impending global catastrophe.”
“This project is kind of funny because I’m not that handy and I don’t have a lot of skills,” she said. “I’m not the best person when it comes to helping people, but it feels like in a lot of ways I’ve been helping people help themselves just through offering time, listening, talking, attention, just bringing a moment of serendipity into someone’s day, and some positivity, encouragement, surprise, enthusiasm. Working with them to finish or do something they’ve been meaning to do.”
Initially, she had set aside 40 hours a week for the project. But she quickly found herself putting in 100-hour weeks. She had barely been sleeping, she said.
Her work has been made lighter by other people. It turns out, a willingness to help others is contagious. Many who came across Ms. Giaever turned her offer back onto her.
In Union Square, a young man in an elegant blue ankle-length caftan offered her a $10 bill. He pointed at her board. During the wall-painting session, one of Ms. Giaever’s crew members, Sasha Whittle, 28, was helping to unbolt a bookshelf in Mr. Zahedi’s kitchen. She asked if anyone could help loosen one of the screws, and it seemed churlish to say no. Then, catching myself, I asked if Mr. Zahedi had a better screwdriver. He did, and I offered it to Ms. Whittle.
“I feel like living in New York, an element of it is being open to strangers and connecting to them,” Ms. Giaever said. “It happens in little ways all the time, so this is just kind of formalizing it.” Still, she said she found it moving: “Like, wow, those people were so open to a chance encounter.”
About a week into her project, Ms. Giaever found herself needing some serious help herself. Her hard drive, containing dozens of hours of shooting — including the video of these very scenes — crashed. She consulted some strangers on Reddit for help.
“Shout-out in particular to someone named Zorb,” she told me a few days later, over the phone, as she drove the crew to meet a 40-something man in Jersey City who asked for help power-washing his boat. She said she had accepted the possibility that the footage may be gone forever.
“It helped kill some ego,” she said. “Asking for help is really vulnerable, and it put me in a great space to empathize with people because a lot of the help tasks have been about loss in some way. People are literally getting rid of their stuff, or saying goodbye to a chapter of their life, or moving after a relationship ended, or if their older and they lost someone.”
She said she especially empathized with an 81-year-old man “whose storage unit was being cleared out and who had to say goodbye to a lifetime’s worth of objects and move on.”
“Often when people are asking for help, they regret how they did something in the past and they wish they had done something differently,” she said of the project, which ends May 16. “And so I could really relate to that sort of self-loathing, where you’re in a tricky position and you need help. It helps somewhat to commiserate.”
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