Art From the Streets

From award-winning filmmaker Eddie Martin comes an up-to-the-minute snapshot of the life and creative processes of outspoken ‘visual freedom fighter’ Anthony Lister, Australia’s most renowned street artist.

Explores the lives of Sara, Gigi and Giovanna, three Latino transvestites who for years have lived on the streets of Manhattan supporting their drug addictions through prostitution. They made their temporary home inside broken garbage trucks that the Sanitation Department keeps next to the salt deposits used in the winter to melt the snow. The three friends share the place known as "The Salt Mines".

A homeless musician finds meaning in his life when he starts a friendship with dozens of parrots.

Every day, on the streets of Canada's cities, we pass them on our way to work or school. Bums, beggars, winos, bag people we call them. But who is the person at the end of that outstretched arm? What is life on the street really like? Is there a way off the street? For six years, director Daniel Cross followed the lives of three homeless men who spent much of their time in and around a Montreal subway station. Filmed in a cinema verité style, the film is unique: it humanizes the homeless, breaking down the barrier between us and them, neither moralizing nor offering easy answers. This is a gritty, compelling look at life on the streets that moves beyond the media stereotypes to show both the humanity of the homeless and the street-toughened aspects of their existence.

For five years, Stephen McCoy documented street life in Boston. This is what he captured.

The journey of Devin Booker is one of loyalty and patience. After years of being under the radar, receiving little national recognition due to playing for a team at the bottom of the NBA, Booker has helped lead the Phoenix Suns to the Western Conference Finals. Very few saw this transformation coming, but if you look back at his story...you wouldn't expect anything different.

A cinematic portrait of the homeless population who live permanently in the underground tunnels of New York City.

In the picture-postcard community of North Vancouver, filmmaker Murray Siple follows men who have turned bottle-picking, their primary source of income, into the extreme sport of shopping cart racing. Enduring hardships from everyday life on the streets of Vancouver, this sub-culture depicts street life as much more than stereotypes portrayed in mainstream media. The films takes a deep look into the lives of the men who race carts, the adversity they face, and the appeal of cart racing despite the risk.

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain an estimated four million children have found themselves living on the streets in the former countries of the Soviet Union. In the streets of Moscow alone there are over 30,000 surviving in this manner at the present time. The makers of the documentary film concentrated on a community of homeless children living hand to mouth in the Moscow train station Leningradsky. Eight-year-old Sasha, eleven-year-old Kristina, thirteen-year-old Misha and ten-year-old Andrej all dream of living in a communal home. They spend winter nights trying to stay warm by huddling together on hot water pipes and most of their days are spent begging. Andrej has found himself here because of disagreements with his family. Kristina was driven into this way of life by the hatred of her stepmother and twelve-year-old Roma by the regular beatings he received from his constantly drunk father. "When it is worst, we try to make money for food by prostitution," admits ...

This documentary about teenagers living on the streets in Seattle began as a magazine article. The film follows nine teenagers who discuss how they live by panhandling, prostitution, and petty theft.

Homelessness in the United States takes many forms. For Elizabeth Herrera, David Lima and their four children, housing instability has meant moving between unsafe apartments, motels, relatives’ couches, shelters, the streets and their car. After 15 years of this uncertainty, the family moved into their first stable housing — an apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area — in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Tell Them We Were Here is an inspirational feature-length documentary about eight artists who show us why art is vital to a healthy society and reminds us that we are stronger together.

What if democracy fails citizens by not serving them all equally? What if inequality becomes the norm and the most vulnerable citizens are left behind with no money, no home, no rights, and no country of their own? In Hungary, the government has slashed social benefits and criminalized homelessness, but a group of activists, homeless and middle class, is confronting authorities to defend social justice and their right to be citizens. After the tragic death of two of its founding members, the group feels that Hungary is growing more hostile and their struggle is more important than ever. Despite all odds, their own community keeps them going—a mini-society with democracy and solidarity at its heart, an island of hope, belonging and dignity in a society gradually shifting the other way.

Valery Liashkevich is a homeless artist who lives at a railway station and for over twenty years has painted pictures in the streets of the town of Gomel in Belarus. For the natives he is no more than a local attraction. For art critics he is a phenomenon worth close attention.

Poignant stories of homelessness on the West Coast of the US frame this cinematic portrait of a surging humanitarian crisis.

In January 2011 Paul Crane discovered a tent city in downtown St. Louis, along the Mississippi River. He was curious as to who these people were, how they ended up there, and what life was like for them each day. He initially thought he would simply go down during the day and capture footage when possible, but he quickly realized that if he wanted to truly capture how these people lived and the full reality of their collective and individual existence, he would have to be there full time and become a part of the place, so he moved in with them.

Would you fall in love with a homeless person? Six years after Occupy Wall Street, Jehan is 42 years old and homeless on the streets of New York City. As she works to save money, get an apartment and return to a "normal" life, she decides that she would also like to get married. Would someone willing to put a dollar in her begging bag also be willing to fall in love with her? Can she find true love with a "normal" person?

Now a successful filmmaker, Lorna Tucker was once a teenage runaway sleeping rough on the streets of London. For this frank, forceful and inspiring documentary, she returns to her former haunts and speaks to current and former homeless people about why, twenty-five years later, record numbers of people are still reduced to living on Britain's streets.

The film explores the turbulent lives of homeless persons in Cologne, Germany. Through their personal belongings the homeless share with the viewer their memories and emotions, and provide insight into the secrets of survival on the street.

Each night in Silicon Valley, the Line 22 transforms from a public city bus into an unofficial shelter for the homeless in one of the richest parts of the world.