The reasons for why a homeless person might find themselves homeless one day are numerous and complicated, but crack coccaine playing a factor in these homeless people’s lives, featured heavily in this documentary.
The definition of homeless shown through living example, can mean a number of things. It can be a state of mind. It can be a situation that one isn’t willing to admit isn’t ‘temporary’ anymore. For some, it could just mean not having running water. A notable aspect of the film is the care to which a lot of the people shown took care of their humble surrounding and themselves. They went about their lives, eating, cooking, cleaning; doing common domestic chores as anyone would. Many said that they were glad to have a permanent shelter as they did, as opposed to other homeless that are living exposed, top side, in parks.
The film’s effectiveness at humanising the homeless in the movie was heart felt and it turns out that Marc Singer’s reasoning behind making the film was to provide some means to help directly those that he saw. A first time film maker, he enlisted the help of many of the subterranean Penn Station residents, to make an impromptu film crew of them. Begging favours for access to editing suites and shooting on borrowed 16mm stock, the film does ultimately help those featured. And it’s in the last few mintues of the film we hear with visible happiness, that these people considered those times living underground, to be dark days indeed.
I saw (most of) this on Sundance a few years back - pretty intense stuff. I only just learned much of what you write above (the subjects of the film also being the crew, etc.) when one of my students in my design research class presented it. I gave ‘em an assignment to review a documentary and look at how stories are captured and retold. This was their analog-intro to design research. Let’s see if it works!
Comment by Steve Portigal — February 8, 2006 @ 11:11 am
that sounds like a great idea for a class.
Comment by est1976 — February 8, 2006 @ 2:08 pm
Great film! Saw it in the theater a few years back. I think that the director actually lived with the homeless people for a year. Was that true?
The music was good too, but not entirely new DJ Shadow stuff at the time. Honestly, I wanted more, but that didn’t detract from the rest of the documentary.
Comment by Erich Ian — February 9, 2006 @ 1:07 pm