Below Sea Level

Director: Gianfranco Rosi

2008 / 117min / DCP

Shot over a five-year period, Rosi’s film respectfully observes and gives voice to a group of individuals who’ve gone as far as anyone could to disappear, the outcasts and drop-outs with colorful sobriquets like “Insane Wayne” and “Bulletproof” living hardscrabble lives in a place called Slab City in California’s desolate desert flatlands some 200 miles southeast of Los Angeles. A privileged view of a “community” bonded by their rejection of contemporary society, capturing the hope and despair that inspired that rejection. “The film’s point of view is simple and naked. It is not the eye of an outsider looking in. It is simply the eye of the place itself witnessing the life of the place.” —Rosi

Distributor: Stemal Entertainment

Part of Gianfranco Rosi: Firmament of the Real