Public Housing

Director: Frederick Wiseman

1997 / 230min / DCP

Only a few years before the Ida B. Wells Homes in Chicago’s South Side were condemned and systematically demolished, Wiseman, indefatigable chronicler of the United States and its institutions, documented daily life—as nearly as possible in every aspect—as lived inside the massive development and the tough streets around it. Tenants’ councils, teen moms, beat cops, caretakers for the elderly, nursery school teachers, the bureaucrats of the Chicago Housing Authority… all these and more lend their voices to Wiseman’s sprawling study of systemic collapse.

“Public Housing has the power of the great classics; it is a social, political, and human odyssey, in which Chicago’s Black neighborhood appears to us as an island of struggle, intelligence, misery, and hope. Some social service workers hold up the neighbourhood like the god Atlas holding up the Earth. Faced with such hardship, some police officers, in turn, become social workers, and throughout the film, dialogues take on the power of profound texts of dreams or despair.” —Claire Simon

Distributor: Zipporah Films

Introduction by Claire Simon on Sunday, March 8th

Part of One Night Only: Claire Simon