Moving In (1982)

MOVING IN begins as a documentary on the growing problem of homelessness in San Francisco in the wake of Reagan-era budget cuts and ends as a meditation on the filmmaker's own relationship to the situation. Having moved into a "bad" area as a middle-class artist searching for affordable living and working space, the filmmaker is confronted with his own luxury of choice about where he places himself in the world while surrounded by people who have no real choice. The film uses the filmmaker's "liberal guilt" about his own privilege to raise questions about whether or not it is possible to represent a world that the filmmaker has had little connection to without further exploiting, sentimentalizing or reinforcing the dehumanization of people who are victims of a political system that privileges greed over equality. MOVING IN is at once a film about homelessness and a question about how that situation is represented.