Night Poem

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TYPE: Documentary Feature
GENRE: Documentary
STATUS: Production

LOGLINE

Night Poem is a verité urban odyssey that follows Krystal, an LA-based homeless person undergoing gender transition, as she travels across the country, hoping to reconcile with her estranged ex-military daughter and meet her newborn grandchild.

SYNOPSIS

Night Poem is a verité urban odyssey that follows Krystal, an LA-based homeless person undergoing gender transition, as she travels across the country, hoping to reconcile with her estranged ex-military daughter and meet her newborn grandchild.

ARTISTIC STATEMENT

One day last summer I was walking up a hill in my Los Angeles neighborhood when I saw a striking figure riding on the back of two shopping carts that were lashed together. Each cart was full to overflowing with recycled bottles and cans, and this person expertly steered the rig down the hill at great speed, through an intersection, and then off out of sight. This was Krystal David Mentz. I met her several days later at a recycling center, where she told me of being homeless in Los Angeles for the last decade, her recycling routine, and the family she still had in North Carolina. She introduced me to several friends of hers, also homeless, who lived under a bridge in concrete cubbyholes. I spent more and more time with this community, running errands together, collecting recycling on trash pick up nights, learning individuals’ stories. The more time I spent with Krystal and her friends the less certain I was of my preconceived ideas about homelessness and the more doubtful I became about any swift “solutions.” The people I have met and spent time with have no representation in our culture. This film is premised on the simple idea that Krystal and other people experiencing homelessness are equal in value to any other human being. Their lives should not be ignored, but seen. “The homeless world is invisible to people who have houses. It’s like they don’t see us. And we can’t see them either. We live in a different world.” - Krystal Mentz The primary artistic aim is to situate viewers in this different world. To represent the world of Krystal and her fellows, without judgment or sentimentality, filters or ideology. In Night Poem the homeless world is reality; the housed world exists only at the periphery. Sparing use of score, no experts or housed people on camera. Intimate hand-held cinematography gives us an unmediated lens on this world and allows access to locations we rarely see. But we also use voiceover and score to add dimensionality to this portrait - this is not raw footage from the streets, but something more considered. Influences include Gus Van Sant’s portraits of saintly, marginalized figures. Days of Heaven’s (1978) recontextualizing, oblique voice over. And Streetwise’s (1984) insistence on the humanity of their subjects.

KEY CREW

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