Poverty in Chicago
Brian Schodorf directs and produces this look at homelessness in Chicago, focusing on how a drug-afflicted homeless population shapes the city around it. The film follows people living on the street, capturing their daily routines, the addictions that keep many of them there, and the toll that visible poverty takes on the neighborhoods and residents who share the same blocks. Rather than treating homelessness as background scenery, the film puts faces and voices to it, letting subjects describe how they ended up outside and what keeps them from getting back in. It also considers the wider ripple effects, from strained city services to the discomfort and avoidance of passersby, framing poverty as a problem that touches far more of Chicago than the people sleeping in doorways. The result is a plain, ground-level record of a crisis usually discussed in statistics rather than faces, made by someone who went out and filmed the people living it.