Trama

Down Here tenderly & cinematic-ally explores the day-to-day survival of Western society's growing ranks of urban castaways. Candid interviews detail brave struggles for basic needs in, what for the homeless is, a post apocalyptic environment.—Charles Wilkinson

Down Here is a story about a place that is growing in the heart of our cities. It is a place we occasionally glimpse from our cars. Down Here stops and enters. We confront a world that appears post apocalyptic. A world filled with the decaying artifacts of a once functioning city. And the survivors. The film portrays a harshly surreal world inhabited by fringe people - the poor, hungry, sick, ashamed. These street dwellers tell us their tales of life without. Life without family, shelter, friendship, comfort, love. Life without resistance to or protection from the addictions, the predators. Life without the safety net that was once considered a fundamental human right. We begin to see them as what they once were, what they struggle to remain - sons, daughters, parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, lovers. We see their daily quests - their struggles to exist in a hostile and frequently toxic environment. Alongside cinematic-ally filmed scenes of dark allies, refuse strewn streets, crumbling buildings, are inter-cut conversations with eight remarkable residents. These intimate conversations unfold in a most unusual way. Homeless people, when interviewed at all, are filmed on the street, in available light, competing for our attention with traffic, sirens, and fellow residents invariably hostile to the camera crew. In Down Here the residents are filmed in a manner usually reserved for celebrities - they are beautifully lit, the environment is quiet and safe, and the conversations are one-on-one. No film crew. The director is alone in a room with the subject and the camera. As the story progresses, we become more and more deeply immersed in this alien world. And then the film pulls back sharply outside the box and we see ourselves. Down Here is not an overtly activist film. No fingers are pointed. No judgments are made. No political views are expressed. No solutions proposed. The majority of us appear to believe the issue is being handled by those whose job it is to take care of such things, when clearly it is not. The majority of us are so engaged in the struggle to hold onto our own health, love, homes, cars, lives that we avoid confronting the reality that a large and rapidly growing number of our family, friends and neighbors live like survivors of nuclear warfare. Down Here. A short documentary film about life without.—Charles Wilkinson