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
Up Next in Essay Films
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Mother, I Am Suffocating. This Is My ...
Directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese • Documentary • 2021 • 76 minutes
As we float through the streets of Lesotho, following a cross-bearing woman and an omnipresent figure wearing wings, a tumultuous history of sorrow and suffering between the motherland and its people unravels. The through lin...
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Backyard
Directed by Ross McElwee • Documentary • 1984 • 40 minutes
The result of McElwee turning his camera on his family and their neighbors, the film is a humorous and poignant look at odd moments in a genteel Southern town.
"Backyard is equal parts Samuel Beckett, Jean-Luc Godard and Werner Herzog."...
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Marx Reloaded
Directed by Jason Barker • Documentary • 2011 • 52 minutes
Today a new generation of philosophers, artists and political activists are returning to Marx's ideas in order to try to make sense of the crisis and to consider whether a world without or beyond capitalism is possible. Is the severity o...
