Filmmakers Jon Shenk and Pedro Kos (whose Netflix-backed short documentary Lead Me Home has been nominated for an Oscar this year) are among the many who used to turn a blind eye to homelessness. It was something which surrounded them in their day to lives.
“This issue, throughout the United States, all of us are really guilty…there is a certain aspect of invisibility [about homelessness],” suggests Kos. “We go about our days trying to, most of the time, actively ignore the human suffering, the humanitarian crisis that is literally, if I walk out the door, right on my block,” Kos observes.
The two filmmakers talk of lifting “the cloak of invisibility” which shrouds the homeless, and letting viewers into their lives. “They [the homeless] want to pierce through that…they want their stories told and seen, and [for them] to be treated in a human way.”
Kos and Shenk began their work depicting the lives of homeless people in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles back in 2017. “It sounds a little bit strange on a film [about] such a difficult topic, but we really had a great deal of creative joy making this project together,” says Shenk.
“We really empowered one another to take the creative risks that we wanted to do,” agrees Kos.
In the doc, the full extent of the suffering of the homeless subjects is exposed in a series of interviews conducted by administrators of homeless shelters with potential ‘clients.’
“We were touring a shelter very early in the process [of making the film] in Seattle, Washington, and we noticed that whenever a new client came in, the first procedure was what they called a vulnerability assessment,” Shenk recalls of a standard procedure which nonetheless yielded painfully raw testimony about what the subjects were experiencing.
“In many ways, they’re cut and dried questions which you might answer in a doctor’s office, but they elicited the most incredible emotional responses,” the director remembers.
The subjects were at such a vulnerable place in their lives that even being asked about their background or health status could trigger outpourings of emotion.
“We asked if we could just place the camera in the room and then leave. That’s what we did. We left the camera and the social workers went about their business, and asked those questions. We operated the camera remotely, of course with the permission of the client,” Shenk explains just how they got hold of the searing, deeply moving interviews which feature prominently in the film.
The two directors “threw away” many of the traditional rules they had learned about documentary making. For example, they avoided voice-over wherever possible. Instead, they used “perspective photography, whether time-lapse, time-shifting or aerial” to give a more panoramic view of their subjects’ lives. They weren’t didactic but sought to “put the issue back in the audience’s lap to let people come up with their own conclusions.”
In the film, viewers are given insights into the daily routines of the homeless subjects: how, for example, they brush their teeth or what they need to do if they want to read at night. (One man sitting outside his tent is shown using a head torch). At the same time, the filmmakers show everyday folk going about their lives from the security of their homes and apartments, behind windows and walls just a few yards away from homeless encampments.
“What we are trying to do is create connection…to show that we have much more in common with our unhoused neighbours than we don’t. The whole film in a way is cut like a parallel symphony between those
people who have the means to have a home and those who have fallen [off] the economic wrung of the bottom of the ladder,” Shenk explains.
The filmmakers are realistic about what their documentary can achieve. They’ve been involved in many previous films highlighting suffering and social injustice. Both realise that a short doc on its own won’t change the system. “First and foremost, and I hope Pedro agrees, I think we make films to touch people’s hearts,” Shenk suggests. “It’s difficult to change people’s minds until you touch people in the heart…we just wanted to remind people there is this incredible breadth of humanity out there that is suffering.”
Attitudes toward the homeless are often tinged with prejudice. There is a tendency to blame those living on the streets for their own predicament rather than considering how housing and social policy, income inequality, medical bills and domestic abuse may have driven them from their homes.
Outsiders often assume that addiction and struggles with mental health will have caused the homelessness. In fact, as Kos points out, “those are actually what usually happen after people are forced out into the streets.” In other words, they’re a symptom and side-effect of homelessness, not its cause.
In Lead Me Home, Kos and Shenk set out to demonstrate the huge “breadth and diversity” of the homeless people’s experiences. The subjects’ stories are all very different but there is often a real camaraderie between them.
“We’re all made of flesh and blood. We’re all love and dream,” Kos states. “We found not only that, but so much more. We found beautiful communities…”
Most of the subjects have now seen the film, which premiered in Telluride last year. They’ve given it a strongly enthusiastic response. “What it feels like to me is that they feel seen…a lot of these people go about their experience as homeless people feeling that society has forgotten them, or, even worse, has hostility toward them,” Shenk notes. “We got very close to our friends who we filmed and we consider them part of our extended family now, most of them. We are keeping our fingers crossed that we can even have a few of them at the Oscars on March 27.”
