Recommended Video List

“8 Mile” 2002
Synopsis: In Eminem's first movie, the white rap star plays a barely disguised version of his pre-celebrity self: Jimmy Smith, Jr., a wounded young man who lives in a trailer in inner-city Detroit with his slatternly mother (Kim Basinger). During jousts at a local club, Jimmy goes up against the best black rappers and fights for the respect of the black audience. These improvised raps are his only release, a spasmodic assertion of self. Curtis Hanson, working from a script by Scott Silver, lays out the narrative and the character relationships methodically, even slowly. The movie may be a shrewdly engineered piece of proletarian pop in the tradition of "Rocky" and "Saturday Night Fever," but Eminem's vile candor gives it a convincingly gritty tone, and the great Mexican cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto ("Amores Perros") keeps the visual palette ugly and raw. With Mekhi Phifer as a local rap impresario and Brittany Murphy as a bright-eyed little mover who takes to Jimmy. (The New Yorker)

“Chop Shop” 2007
Synopsis: Alejandro, a tough and ambitious Latino street orphan on the verge of adolescence, lives and works in an auto-body repair shop in a sprawling junkyard on the outskirts of Queens, New York. In this chaotic world of adults, young Alejandro struggles to make a better life for himself and his 16-year-old sister, Isamar. (IMDB)

“Easy Street” 2006
Synopsis: Easy Street is a feature-length film that documents one year in the lives of homeless people in St. Petersburg, Florida. The viewer sees and hears first hand, how people scratch out an existence on the streets of America’s urban centers. We learn how they got there and what keeps them there.  This is a must see film for sociology and psychology students, advocates and service agency personnel, churches whose parishioners want to help, and anyone who feels compelled to learn more about an underclass of American society whose ranks continue to grow every year. (wideyedfilms.com)

“Have You Seen Clem?” 2005
Synopsis: Jaymo, an aspiring filmmaker, suddenly finds himself homeless and living out of his car. Desperate to find a way out, he begins shooting a documentary about the overlooked homeless people in this sharply divided society. When he meets a mysterious bum named Clem, Jaymo realizes that every homeless person has a cart full of secrets and a unique story of personal collapse to tell. Together they embark on a road trip to different cities to meet and understand more about the forgotten homeless people that struggle to live on and find contentment on the streets of America. Their eye-opening journey culminates in Nashville, where Clem seeks his ultimate revenge against the unscrupulous banker who caused his fall from grace. The soundtrack is a riveting mix of original songs performed entirely by the street musicians that the filmmakers meet as they travel across America. (IMDB)

“Homeless to Harvard: The Liz Murray Story” 2003
Synopsis: At 15, Liz Murray finds herself living on the streets after her mentally ill, drug-addicted parents falter in their attempts to keep their family together. Instead of crumbling, the troubled teen clings to hope and determination, and works her way up and out of homelessness - all the way to Harvard University. This three-time Emmy-nominated film is based on an incredible true story. (MyLifetime.com)

“The Gleaners and I” 2000
Synopsis: The French filmmaker Agnès Varda, digital camera in hand, roams around her native country recording the movements of gleaners. Traditionally, as in the archetypal Millet painting, gleaners were women who gathered the remains of the harvest; their modern counterparts are mostly scavengers, searching in dumpsters and other likely places. The French, of course, give the practice a wonderfully perverse twist – many gleaners do so by choice, disdainful of wastefulness and rampant consumerism. (The New Yorker)

“Kicking It” 2008
Synopsis: In the summer of 2006, while the football world's attention was focused on Germany, thousands of players around the globe were training hard and competing to be part of another World Cup ... The Homeless World Cup.  It had been a wild idea by a Scot and an Austrian -- to give homeless people a chance to change their lives through an international street soccer competition.  Five years later, the annual Homeless World Cup had become an internationally recognized sports competition.  500 homeless players from 48 nations would ultimately be selected to represent their country in Cape Town, South Africa - coming from such disparate parts of the world as war torn Afghanistan, the slums of Kenya, the drug rehab clinics of Dublin, Ireland, the streets of Charlotte, North Carolina, the overflowing public shelters of Madrid, Spain, and the unforgiving city of St. Petersburg, Russia, where the homeless have no rights or identity.  Win or lose, for these players it would be the journey of a lifetime. (AOL)

“Man Push Cart” 2005
Synopsis: It's 3:00 a.m. in Manhattan, the hour of rumbling garbage trucks, glaring headlights, and the bluish florescent glow of the all-night delis. Trudging alongside the honking traffic, Ahmad drags a coffee and bagel cart to a busy midtown corner. Hours later, he is swiftly and efficiently selling steaming cups of "coffee regular" to rushing New Yorkers. In the afternoons, he battles traffic to return the cart to a warehouse, occasionally peddling bootleg DVDs for extra cash along the way. A solitary, quiet loner, Ahmad strikes up slightly awkward friendships with Noemi, a young Spanish woman who works at a newsstand, and wealthy, jovial Mohammad, who is shocked when he realizes Ahmad was a famous singer in Pakistan. Through Ahmad's relationships with both his new friends, and his estranged family, we come to understand that he is haunted by a tragedy in his past. A beautifully crafted character study that captures the textures of a very specific New York experience, Ramin Bahrani's Man Push Cart is a subtle, insightful portrait of a man struggling with issues of identity, self-worth, and the harsh realities of finding a place to belong in a vast, often-unfriendly American metropolis. (Sundance Film Festival)

“My Own Four Walls” 2008
Synopsis: Melissa is one of over 1.5 million homeless children and youth struggling to survive in America.  These courageous young people, with parents and without; staying in shelters, motels, abandoned buildings, doubled-up, living in vans, substandard trailers, or as "couch surfers" hopping from one fragile living arrangement to another have one important thing in common: They all have hopes and dreams just like children who have their own four walls.  Melissa said, “It’s better to have your own four walls.”  She’s right.  Hear her poignant story and stories of the rest of these kids from non-urban communities across the country. (HearUs.com)

“Our House” 2006
Synopsis: After taking an overdose of pills in an attempt to commit suicide after the recent death of her husband and the rejection of her family, Ruth, an elderly socialite is saved by Billy, a homeless woman. Although Billy is initially resistant to Ruth's attempts to befriend her, she eventually relents and accepts a place to stay in the lonely old socialite's mansion. To the dismay of Ruth's family and neighbors, several other homeless people also move in with them. (Wikipedia)

“Outriders” 1999
Synopsis: In the heady boom times people at the bottom of the economic ladder are becoming invisible, but a handful of desperately poor Americans refuse to disappear. Fifty of them; infants, teens, mothers, and grandmothers, crowd into a “freedom bus” and criss-cross the United States documenting the effects of “welfare reform” on other poor people. Their mission: to place evidence of growing American poverty before the United Nations. (Skylight Pictures)

“Pursuit of Happyness” 2006
Synopsis: A heartwarming film that demonstrates how good, hard-working people can become homeless almost overnight, Pursuit of Happyness is a tour-de-force showcase for Will Smith, who convincingly portrays a down-and-out dad trying to better his family's life. A chain of circumstances left Gardner jobless and homeless at age 30, and he found himself and his baby son living in a bathroom at a San Francisco train station. Despite the negative situation Gardner continued to fight toward his goal of becoming a broker eventually landing a job as a trainee and rising through the ranks at such companies as Dean Witter and Bear Stearns to his current standing -- partner and owner of the Chicago-based minority brokerage firm Gardner Rich & Co. and self-made millionaire. (Amazon)

“Sweet Sixteen” 2002
Synopsis: Liam is a young, restless teen struggling to realize his dream in the gritty and dismal streets of Greenock, Scotland, where unemployment is rampant and little hope is available to the city's youth. He is waiting for the release of his mother, Jean, from prison where she is completing a prison term for a crime that her boyfriend actually committed. Her boyfriend, Stan, is a crude and obnoxious drug pusher partnered by Liam's equally rough and foul-mouthed, mean-spirited grandfather. Liam is determined to rescue his mother from both of them, which means creating a safe haven beyond their reach. But first he's got to raise the cash--no small feat for a young man.  It's not long before Liam and his pals' crazy schemes lead them into all sorts of trouble.

“Takeover” 1990
Synopsis: In "Takeover," Pamela Yates and Peter Kinoy follow people who are nothing less than homeless guerrillas, bound to take back what they feel is theirs. As the film moves back and forth from Philadelphia to New York to Minneapolis and other cities, it becomes a deftly edited collage. The camera lets the homeless tell their stories, then goes along as they break padlocks, move into boarded-up houses and are sometimes arrested.  These people turn out to be an articulate group, well mixed to prove that homelessness can happen to anyone: a white husband and wife, a middle-class black widow and her son, an uneducated American Indian who is the single mother of several small children. (The New York Times)