
12 Mar 2017

I Am Another You
Through the eyes of a young drifter who rejects society's rules and intentionally chooses to live on the streets, Chinese filmmaker Nanfu Wang explores the meaning of personal freedom – and its limits.
In January 2011 Paul Crane discovered a tent city in downtown St. Louis, along the Mississippi River. He was curious as to who these people were, how they ended up there, and what life was like for them each day. He initially thought he would simply go down during the day and capture footage when possible, but he quickly realized that if he wanted to truly capture how these people lived and the full reality of their collective and individual existence, he would have to be there full time and become a part of the place, so he moved in with them.
Himself
12 Mar 2017
Through the eyes of a young drifter who rejects society's rules and intentionally chooses to live on the streets, Chinese filmmaker Nanfu Wang explores the meaning of personal freedom – and its limits.
06 Oct 2006
49 Up is the seventh film in a series of landmark documentaries that began 42 years ago when UK-based Granada's World in Action team, inspired by the Jesuit maxim "Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man," interviewed a diverse group of seven-year-old children from all over England, asking them about their lives and their dreams for the future. Michael Apted, a researcher for the original film, has returned to interview the "children" every seven years since, at ages 14, 21, 28, 35, 42 and now again at age 49.In this latest chapter, more life-changing decisions are revealed, more shocking announcements made and more of the original group take part than ever before, speaking out on a variety of subjects including love, marriage, career, class and prejudice.
30 Aug 2000
A cinematic portrait of the homeless population who live permanently in the underground tunnels of New York City.
29 Apr 2021
On June 13, 1978, the punk bands the Cramps and the Mutants played a free show for psychiatric patients at the Napa State Hospital in California. We Were There to Be There chronicles the people, politics, and cultural currents that led to the show and its live recording.
01 Oct 1990
Explores the lives of Sara, Gigi and Giovanna, three Latino transvestites who for years have lived on the streets of Manhattan supporting their drug addictions through prostitution. They made their temporary home inside broken garbage trucks that the Sanitation Department keeps next to the salt deposits used in the winter to melt the snow. The three friends share the place known as "The Salt Mines".
07 Dec 1984
This documentary about teenagers living on the streets in Seattle began as a magazine article. The film follows nine teenagers who discuss how they live by panhandling, prostitution, and petty theft.
27 Nov 2018
Intimate true stories from St Kilda's Gatwick Private Hotel. Meet the incredible characters including sisters Rose and Yvette who dedicated their lives to caring for the forgotten.
17 Apr 2008
In the picture-postcard community of North Vancouver, filmmaker Murray Siple follows men who have turned bottle-picking, their primary source of income, into the extreme sport of shopping cart racing. Enduring hardships from everyday life on the streets of Vancouver, this sub-culture depicts street life as much more than stereotypes portrayed in mainstream media. The films takes a deep look into the lives of the men who race carts, the adversity they face, and the appeal of cart racing despite the risk.
05 Aug 2005
Since the fall of the Iron Curtain an estimated four million children have found themselves living on the streets in the former countries of the Soviet Union. In the streets of Moscow alone there are over 30,000 surviving in this manner at the present time. The makers of the documentary film concentrated on a community of homeless children living hand to mouth in the Moscow train station Leningradsky. Eight-year-old Sasha, eleven-year-old Kristina, thirteen-year-old Misha and ten-year-old Andrej all dream of living in a communal home. They spend winter nights trying to stay warm by huddling together on hot water pipes and most of their days are spent begging. Andrej has found himself here because of disagreements with his family. Kristina was driven into this way of life by the hatred of her stepmother and twelve-year-old Roma by the regular beatings he received from his constantly drunk father. "When it is worst, we try to make money for food by prostitution," admits ...
03 Sep 2021
Poignant stories of homelessness on the West Coast of the US frame this cinematic portrait of a surging humanitarian crisis.
15 Nov 2019
Following director Rotimi Rainwater, a former homeless youth, as he travels the country to shine a light on the epidemic of youth homelessness in America.
16 May 2025
A homeless man living in a encampment in Minneapolis tells his perspective on the ongoing crisis of homelessness.
01 Jan 1992
The homeless, underground residents at a post-communist train station and their intimate confessions. A film not about misery, but the lust for life and color even at the depths of human despair.
29 Jan 2012
Filmed over a number of years, David Vondráček’s powerful documentary records the lives of Jan and Jana, a homeless couple who find refuge in a cemetery in the Prague borough of Strašnice. Living on food from garbage containers and trading the books and porn magazines they find there, they nonetheless live lives of independence, love and humour. Jana, a former prostitute, tries to visit her daughter while Jan visits his aged mother after many years, but both fail to re-establish links with their past. Through identification with their everyday world, Vondráček reaches the human reality and complexity beneath the surface, a world not so different from that of the supposedly successful. Eventually, they are expelled from their temporary home with heartbreaking consequences. Vondráček’s award-winning documentary reveals the breadth of experience – even vibrancy – surviving in the world of the dispossessed.
13 May 2016
Forced onto the streets in her 50s, Marie found "home" at a Santa Monica laundromat. Taking shelter there for 20 years, Mimi's passion for pink, and living without looking back, has taken her from homelessness to Hollywood's red carpets.
01 Dec 1986
The recession of the 1980s split the country into the haves and have-nots, from family farmers to factory workers and homeless people forced to live in decrepit welfare hotels. On the verge of losing everything, courageous Americans discover the power of community organizing to fight injustice.
05 Apr 2025
Mariem, 53, a former estate agent, has been living at a shelter for several months. Surrounded by women in far more precarious circumstances than herself, she tries to regard her unprecedented social downfall as an immersion in real life. By the time she leaves, Mariem’s view of the world will have changed forever, enriched by all the women she has met along the way.
01 Apr 2016
From the glitzy sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard to the urban wasteland of Skid Row, "Forgotten" portrays the cruel reality of being homeless in Los Angeles and how these men and women cope with life on the streets of one of America's largest cities.
07 Dec 2012
Los Angeles' Skid Row is home to one of the largest homeless populations in the United States. And we found, inside that community, the remarkable and enormously moving stories of Olympic athletes, Harvard attorneys, accomplished musicians, scholars. We found poverty, drugs and mental illness, of course - but more importantly we found life, hope and incredibly powerful human journeys.
01 Dec 2019
Beat Goes On is an impressionistic portrait of the activist Keith Cylar (1958–2004), co-founder of Housing Works and a central figure in the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP) NY. Cylar spoke clearly, frequently and with moral force about the struggles of people living with HIV/AIDS in New York City, many of whom were impoverished and struggling with multiple social and medical problems. His openness about his own drug use and the centrality of the fight against the criminalization of drugs for AIDS activism make Cylar's legacy especially resonant and relevant at this time. Commissioned by Visual AIDS in 2019 as part of STILL BEGINNING, a program of seven short videos responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic.