Directed by Natalie Bookchin • Documentary • 2016 • 45 minutes

In the moving and immersive film LONG STORY SHORT, over 100 people at homeless shelters, food banks, adult literacy programs, and job training centers in Los Angeles and the Bay Area in Northern California discuss their experiences of poverty: why they are poor, how it feels, and what they think should be done about American poverty and homelessness today. Numerous interviews by the artist and MacArthur Grantee Natalie Bookchin are stitched together to form a polyphonic account of American poverty told from the inside.

"An incredible work of montage on the collective power of speech."—Maria Bonsanti, Artistic Director, Cinema du Reel

"[The film's] candid but humanizing approach interrupts the prejudice and pity commonly directed toward individuals living in poverty, revealing instead the long-term, systemic nature of economic disenfranchisement."—Jennifer Gonzalez, Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture, UC Santa Cruz