![]() ![]() “The contrast is shockingly stark,” says Brigham Yen, a downtown Los Angeles real-estate expert and chronicler of the area’s revitalisation on his site DTLA Rising. One wrong turn out of a trendy night spot or the Disney concert hall and you can find yourself in another world, where encampments of the drug-addicted and mentally ill spill out on to the sidewalk for block after block after block. Every Angeleno has seen these tents – always between the hours of 9pm and 6am, when police look the other way about camping on the streets. We know the victim lived in a tent he’d pitched it near the corner of San Pedro and 6th street. Known locally by the name “Africa” or “Cameroon”, he was shot by several officers after allegedly grabbing one of their guns beyond that, facts about the precise sequence of events have been slow to emerge. The neighbourhood went from metaphorical to literal battleground last Sunday when, on a rare rainy day in this city, an altercation with Los Angeles Police Department officers resulted in the death of a 45-year-old resident. It’s no exaggeration to call Skid Row one of the main battlegrounds for the future of Los Angeles. The struggles over what to do with it now reveal the extent of the challenge facing LA in its current transformation into a denser, more traditionally urban city. ![]() Skid Row’s very existence illustrates a major planning mistake the southern Californian metropolis made in the past. Los Angeles’s Skid Row, a common name for a once-common form of down-and-out quarter in American cities, persists as the last neighbourhood of its kind. Effectively discussing the past, present, and future of the area, the film is compassionate and nonjudgmental, allowing for people living on Skid Row to make a case for themselves and offer up solutions to improve their lives.I n the centre of one of the world’s most high-profile cities lies a concentration of desperate poverty unlike any other in the developed world. Carlson first allows Hall to tell the story of how he arrived on Skid Row and then follows him as he introduces viewers to other remarkable people living there, including members of a music choir and activists fighting to form a neighborhood council - all of them searching for purpose and connection while overcoming the economic disadvantages of life on Skid Row. Narrated by charismatic Iraq War veteran Gerald Hall, who acts as the viewer’s guide through the enormous homeless encampment, “Skid Row, Los Angeles” goes well beyond the typical view of the area to reveal the people and the stories that make up its large homeless community. ![]() Former New Filmmakers Forum winner Van Maximilian Carlson (2019’s “Princess of the Row”) returns to SLIFF with an informative and wide-ranging documentary that covers - and challenges conventional notions of - LA’s infamous Skid Row. ![]()
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January 2023
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