2017-05-22
0
In Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, a group of friends lives on the streets. They call themselves the Freetown Streetboys, even though there are some women among them as well. Suley, Lama, David, Alfred, Shero and Sarah have all faced enormous physical and psychological challenges, and have been abandoned by the world around them. Without commentary and in poetic, cinematic images, the camera records the dark environment that they inhabit. The group shares their heartrending stories of the precarious nature of life in this complex country. But there is also room for everyday personal struggles, such as starting relationships, how to bring up children (or not), and sex.
How might your life be better with less? The popular simple-living duo The Minimalists examines the many flavors of minimalism by taking the audience inside the lives of minimalists from various walks of life.
Thomas Hirschhorn, one of the few Swiss artists of world renown, often touches on social wounds with his provocative works. In 2013, Hirschhorn built a monument for Italian philosopher and communist Antonio Gramsci in a public housing project in the Bronx. The contentious artist collaborated with neighborhood residents whose everyday life is impacted by poverty, unemployment and crime. Conflicts and misunderstandings are bound to arise as Hirschhorn’s absolute devotion to art is confronted with the resident’s lack of prospects and fatalistic outlooks. The «Gramsci Monument» becomes a summer-long experiment where diverse worlds collide: blacks and whites, the art elite and street kids, party people and poets, politicians and philosophers. A nuanced film about art, politics and passion.
Mom and Me is a personal and intimate documentary about a young filmmaker coming of age in extraordinary circumstances. It follows the complicated relationship between director Lena Macdonald and her mother, who was once a filmmaker herself, but ended up homeless, crack-addicted and on the streets. For ten years Lena filmed in the cold, hard streets of Toronto’s inner city and her story is raw, honest and unforgettable. Mom and Me is about addiction, prostitution and despair but it is also a story about family, the power of hope and the tenacity of love.
Through interviews with people on the street and songs recorded to memorialize JFK in the mid-1960s, the film explores the impact of the November 22, 1963 assassination on issues in today’s world, from lingering conspiracy theories to the proliferation of gun violence, homelessness, and the scourge of K-2.
Chester P (Real talk records) takes a film crew with him on a journey as he attempts to find the truth about the effects of the austerity measures and the housing crisis on the people of London with a moving and insightful narrative.
A resident of a ghetto’s neighborhood of São Paulo amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Gustavo has severe anxiety attacks. When he receives a call from a friend who lives in the same street, he reflects different stories of neighborhood residents in parallel with his family's daily life during social isolation.
This feature-length documentary by Alanis Obomsawin examines the plight of Native people who come to Montreal searching for jobs and a better life. Often arriving without money, friends or jobs, a number of them quickly become part of the homeless population. Both dislocated from their traditional values and alienated from the rest of the population, they are torn between staying and returning home.
Now a successful filmmaker, Lorna Tucker was once a teenage runaway sleeping rough on the streets of London. For this frank, forceful and inspiring documentary, she returns to her former haunts and speaks to current and former homeless people about why, twenty-five years later, record numbers of people are still reduced to living on Britain's streets.
Max Ramsey, an advocate for those experiencing poverty, uses what he has gone through to serve the impoverished community of Milwaukee despite internal struggles and disapproval from the city.
Community First! Village is designed to lift the chronically homeless off the streets of the Austin, TX, offering them a place to call home, helping them to heal from the ravages of life on the streets, and allowing them to rediscover a purpose in their lives. This documentary explores the events that cause homelessness and the heartwarming stories of being welcomed into a nurturing environment where dignity and self-worth are restored.
Award winning feature documentary about an art program for homeless people.
To do this documentary, the director Pedro Henrique Fávero featured 42 characters - among MCs, DJs and producers - to make a detailed map of its kind in the country. Without mincing words, they speak openly here about 8 topics proposed by the film and try to understand Hip Hop in Brazil. The result is a collection of stories from a lot of fighting, where there are many eternal start-end-start, overcoming the difficulties of being understood and feeling of belonging to a group and many clichés.
Documentary tells the story of Maxim Vakhmin, a veritable alleycat of a man. Revered as both an angel and a devil, Maxim (once known as a successful artist in his native Russia) is losing friends and finding new ones as a homeless person in the USA.
In the spring of 2018, the filmmaker Maria Petschnig befriended Marc who at that time was living in his car in Brooklyn for more than a year, while also holding a day job. Petschnig started to record his life and struggle, his thoughts, routines, etc. over the course of two years.