Founder and CEO of the San Francisco Green Film Festival Asks, "What Does Home Mean To You, and How Will You Defend It?”

Image by Tommy Lau Photography.

If you had taken your seat before the lights went down in the Castro Theatre for the opening of the 2019 San Francisco Green Film Festival (SFGFF), you may have noticed a bit of situational irony hanging from the walls. The sound-cancelling tapestries in the main showroom display a set of Corinthian columns enclosing an assemblage of cypress trees, exuberant foliage and naked bodies, all of which appear to be thriving. The cypress stand tall and straight, the bushes low and plump, and the bodies sublimely relaxed. Life is fully underway, yet remains restrained by latticed walkways and the columns behind them - the built environment. The tapestries tell a story where living and non-living figures coexist such that enjoyable, fulfilling, and relaxed life may proceed. This is not, however, the story of the film we had all come to see.

The opening remarks from SFGFF Founder and CEO Rachel Caplan focused on the mission of the festival, which began in 2013 and is now a premier environmental arts program on the West Coast. Caplan closed her remarks with the mantra of the 2019 film festival, “Change Starts at Home”, and asked us each to consider the question “What does home mean to you, and how will you defend it?”

Through film, dialogue and action, the SFGFF intends to educate and build power in the environmental community, as well as create transformative arts experiences for individuals to absorb current environmental realities and envision our possible futures. Bay Area residents, UN Special Rapporteur Leilani Farha, PUSH film director Fredrik Gertten, and Oakland Mayor Libby Schaff were in attendance, and each person’s presence transmitted the basic message that they believe something needs to be done! The effect of the theater was genuine; we were there, engaged, ready to learn and be transformed.

Left to Right: Special Rapporteur Leilani Farha, Mayor Libby Schaff, Director Fredrik Gertten. Image by Tommy Lau Photography.

Director Fredrik Gertten’s film PUSH follows UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing Leilani Farha as she works to understand the demographic flux of urban areas around the world (mainly the Americas and Europe). Farha stops in Berlin, Valparaiso, Toronto, London, Harlem, and Milan to meet people who are housing insecure. Common issues for the working class people she connects with are rent hikes and dubious eviction notices, but some are forced out of their homes in far more tragic ways.

When Farha interviews a man from Notting Hill, London, it comes out that he lost his home in the Grenfell Tower fire in June of 2017. The interviewee visibly tenses up when he recalls leaving his dog in the burning building, but eventually reminds himself of his luck, to be alive. Seventy two people were not so lucky; it was the deadliest fire in London in over a century. The fire was more deadly and powerful than it could have been estimated due to a recent renovation and some cost-saving measures from regulators and technology companies. The Grenfell case exemplifies one of PUSH’s core messages that the ways in which homes are built and managed are becoming a major source of human suffering.

When faced with a lack of affordable housing and a surplus of vacant homes in London, one group of activists resorted to occupying a vacant £15m house in Eaton Square. According to the film, the insurgents were also leading an effort to organize the city's homeless population through education, sharing meals, and watching films together. Special Rapporteur Farha connects directly with some of these activists to understand their unorthodox methods and in doing so she uncovers an extreme and brilliant example of what people will resort to in order to secure a soft place to rest their head. A more focused look at the “Occupy Belgravia” movement, and its termination by armed state officials can be found here.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaff on the film PUSH: “I loved it. I think the film has a unique way of educating us and making us feel deeply at the same time, and so it’s such an important medium to change hearts and minds. I like how it dug under the crisis to expose something much bigger, and honestly insidious, that I think most people suspect is behind the housing crisis. As a mayor who is part of some international coalitions of mayors, I heartily agree that this is not [just] a Bay Area problem or a California problem or an American problem. It is a city problem.”

During moments when the film’s plot becomes increasingly despairing, Farha returns to an ongoing conversation with Columbia University’s Professor of Sociology Saskia Sassen. Sassen is helpful in synthesizing and clarifying the raw experiences of the tenants in the film and helps to channel the glut of emotional tension into specific, actionable areas. In one conversation, Sassen jokes, “When I hear people today say ‘It’s gentrification’, one reaction - an ironic reaction - is: if only.”

She artfully validates the reality of this nagging process of gentrification: a rising tide linked to home value and household income - but also points to Grenfell and Belgravia to clarify that something much more sinister than an influx of vintage clothing stores and lime scooters is underpinning this “push”. According to Sassen, the financialization of housing, through the minimization of costs for landlords or by acquiring homes as assets to only keep them vacant, is making life in the city impossible for wage laborers and other working class people.

In a conversation with director Fredrik Gertten, I mentioned that the film serves as an effective tool that led me to empathize with the people in the film who struggled to make ends meet. It made me wonder if the struggles of folks who will be aging both into these jobs and this crisis could have been included in the film. For instance, one in ten undergraduate respondents to a housing survey from the UC Berkeley Basic Needs Center reported that they had experienced homelessness at some point since entering the university.

I asked Gertten what people my age should be focused on - not just to avoid homelessness ourselves as we enter this “market”, but to move this society we are inheriting out of crisis.

The director responded by explaining, “I don’t know what the answer is, but we all have to fight back. I believe in fighting back by creating a new language. That’s what I hope to do with the film. If we use their language, where the market is something normal, it’s almost like the weather report. Prices are going up, oh there is a bubble... you know, there is all this [language]... Housing is a human right, it’s not an investment object. It’s something different, you know? Just by reframing it I think we can have a better conversation.”

He’s right. Language is an essential tool, and when we use their vocabulary, this crisis over a basic human right becomes controlled by whoever chooses which words are acceptable to use. He is also right in saying it doesn’t have to be this way. We can get involved in groups like the Berkeley Food and Housing Project; we can vote on rent control initiatives like Proposition 10 next November and we can inform ourselves of our rights as tenants under the Tenant Protection Act of 2019 (read more about the bill here).

Ultimately, there’s room for both individual and collective action, as well as self defense. We can also accept support from the business sector. Marc and Lynne Benioff recently pledged $30 million to fund research at UCSF on the causes and solutions to homelessness on a national level. It may not sit well with some readers, but these are the kinds of resources that are needed, and to their credit, the Benioff Homelessness Initiative operates in the same paradigm as Gertten’s film, where homelessness is seen as the symptom of a dearth of affordable housing.

So what does home mean to you, and how will you defend it?

When you ask yourself, at the very least you reflect on your own needs, which, hopefully, you see as indispensable. It’s also an easy starting point to push a little deeper. Maybe you find yourself thinking of your housemates, your family, your town. Perhaps you go further still and begin to empathize with our network of biological collaborators Perhaps your mind lands on the entirety of the biosphere as the home to be protected.

Wherever the mind chooses to land, Rachel Caplan’s question “What does home mean to you?” should be returned to. The question holds within it an effective mechanism for cognitive engagement with our environment and the topic of the San Francisco Green Film Festival’s opening night film, PUSH.