Dark Days

Saw Dark Days, a documentary about homeless people living underground in New York City. The documentary begins as you might expect, marveling first at the fact that they live like this at all and then at the fact that they have some meager amenities (electricity, heat, and even, once upon a time, running water.) We then get to know them and their lives a bit. The filmmaker draws them out on how they make a living, how they cope with having no home. Drug use is rampant and some of the drug users tell stories of their past, their guilt over their perceived sins fueling their addictions.

The film is not as dismal as it might seem. There's obvious unpleasant metaphors to make (the underground being a retreat from society, an embrace of the primordial and caveman-like, a descent into decomposing soil) but the film contents itself to straight documentation. The homeless folks are optimistic about their situation, with a pugnacious pride in themselves and in their living situations. One younger one, Tommy, says he is not homeless because he has a home. Other hobos show off their dogs and cats, to keep people and rats away respectively. They paint their huts and clean their clothing and sniff at each other for leaving out pans for rats to walk over. They have little but they have something. There's plenty of gross moments (at one point one of them is happily talking about the cleanliness of the food outside of a kosher butcher, as he stuffs hand-fulls of beef into a plastic shopping bag) but they are not the point of the film.

We end on a merciful high note, with the homeless being evicted but also being moved into section 8 housing. They are all nearly drunk with joy as they paint and decorate and plan for the future of their wonderful homes. An often emotional but not so bad look into a dark netherworld.

Edit: oh my god, the director was apparently an underground-homeless person as well. You'd never know. It's shot and edited in a top-notch professional manner. Amazing.