Nobody Living Can Ever Stop Me

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TYPE: Documentary Feature
GENRE: Documentary
STATUS: Post-Production

LOGLINE

Nobody Living Can Ever Stop Me is a portrait of American homelessness focusing on Krystal, a transwoman living under an overpass in Los Angeles. A member of a tight-knit community of homeless residents in LA, s/he dreams of reuniting with their daughter and meeting their newborn grandchild. Ashley, living in poverty in North Carolina, longs for the father she never knew. But after years of addiction and life on the street, Krystal is terrified of abandoning the security of their daily routines. Our story culminates with Krystal’s train-hopping journey across America for an emotional reunion with their daughter. 

SYNOPSIS

Krystal hasn’t spoken to their daughter Ashley in years. Krystal doesn’t own a phone. They have no way to get in touch with their daughter, ask about their newborn grandchild, or wish Ashley a happy 30th birthday next month. Krystal is homeless. They live in Los Angeles, under the Highway 101 overpass at Silver Lake Blvd.

Krystal David Mentz grew up poor in North Carolina. They knew they were a woman from age 6, but their male body and strict religious upbringing told them they were wrong. Krystal’s struggles with addiction and petty crime brought them into the American carceral system at an early age. They had a daughter, Ashley, at 18, but could not care for her financially. Through years of incarceration and homelessness, wearing dresses found in dumpsters and clothing banks, Krystal scrounged a makeshift cocktail of off-label hormone treatments. Ashley left high school early and joined the Air Force, and so Krystal left town too, stowing aboard a freight train bound for the west coast. When they arrived in Los Angeles, the same cycle of poverty, homelessness, addiction, and torment about their gender identity started again.

Today, Krystal is part of a tight-knit community of homeless residents that feels like a big family dinner, complete with tenderness and infighting. Freeway traffic thunders above them as they cook food and struggle to survive in the wealthiest nation in global history.

With help from local outreach workers, Krystal has finally begun their formal gender transition, receiving hormone treatments from a medical transition specialist. They dream of triumphantly returning to their daughter, in North Carolina. But after years of life on the street, they are terrified of abandoning the security of their daily routines and the familiarity of their community for a daughter they barely know. Krystal is at a crisis point – torn between the desire to “straighten out” their life, reunite with their family and live “inside,” and the deep bond with their community on the streets of Los Angeles.

Over the course of weeks, taking buses, freight trains, walking, or hitchhiking, Krystal journeys across the country to return to Ashley and “home.”

Nobody Living Can Ever Stop Me is an emotional but never sentimental portrait of American homelessness in the 21st century. 

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 this film, the homeless world is reality; the housed world exists only at the periphery. 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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