MOVING PICTURES

OSCAR CONTENDER CONTENDS WITH HOUSING CRISIS AT BELCOURT THEATRE

BY JOE NOLAN, FILM CRITIC

Pedros Kos and Jon Shenk’s Academy Award nominated documentary short film examines contemporary poverty and the American housing crisis, offering a view from the streets of cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, which have all declared states of emergency in response to homelessness.

The introduction text in the film’s opening frames informs viewers that this Netflix production was shot in these cities between 2017 and 2020.

Lead Me Home takes viewers on an impressionistic tour of life on America’s streets in the 21st century. Viewers get the sense that the entire West Coast is dotted by small gatherings of improvised tent villages at the edges of urban centers or right up against the highway or right outside of residences and businesses. We see the tent villages creep to life in the early morning along with the rest of the city. Kids scramble for school while adults in sunrise windows pour coffee and click through the morning headlines. At the same time a man in a tent brushes his teeth without a sink and another rolls up a sleeping bag and stuffs it into a pack. Lead Me Home takes us into aid offices and into the side conversations at a mobile street shower stop. It also takes us into boardrooms and back rooms where officials and legislators wrangle the fuzzy statistics, restrictive budgets, meager resources and ill-fitting solutions that represent vulnerable human lives in abstract.

Generally, documentaries about poverty tend toward either noble profiles of people struggling on the streets or well-intentioned sociopolitical critiques that can dull the humanity out of their human subjects in a mist of data, spin, polls and blah-blah talking heads. Lead Me Home admirably insists on artistry and puts cinematic storytelling to work here with gorgeous photography, imaginative editing, and a uniquely detached perspective that manages to communicate much of the breadth and the detailed complexity of America’s housing crisis without preaching or teaching. The filmmakers give us meditative moments to ponder the poetry of clothes tumbling in slow motion in a laundromat dryer and to anxiously look over the shoulder of a mom at a grocery checkout, worried about being able to afford food for her family.

Lead Me Home makes generous, but not monotonous, use of drone photography, and there are long sequences throughout this movie with no talking, and no focus on one particular subject. This footage is all accompanied by a many-textured soundtrack that spans from ambient scoring to singer-songwriter ballads accompanying footage of a highway at night. Again, Lead Me Home is admirably poetic where other films about these subjects are often polemic, and it’s a vital film about an emergency that’s right in front of us.

Lead Me Home is screening in the 2022 Oscar-Nominated Short Films: Documentary program at the Belcourt Theatre. The slate of true life shorts opens on this Friday, March 4 alongside two other programs of Oscar-nominated animated and live action shorts. All three of these shorts programs are going to look very good on the big screens at the Belcourt, where viewers can get a closer look at the shorter cinema stories that are too-often overlooked.

Go to www.belcourt.org for tickets and times

Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.