Q&A: Conversation With Filmmaker Colin K. Gray on American Inequality
☆ BY GiGi Kang ☆
“VENICE IS LIKE ONE BIG GIGANTIC FAMILY. IT’S ALL FUCKED UP —It’s dysfunctional. It’s loving. It’s caring. And it argues a lot. But it loves each other no matter what,” Juri Koll, founder of Venice Institute of Contemporary Art, says in UNZIPPED: An Autopsy of American Inequality.
The documentary, directed by Colin K. Gray, investigates the intricacies of the affordable housing crisis in the United States. The film focuses on Venice, California, through two local families who are both struggling financially and have artistic passions. Acting as the center points of the film, the families provide a tangible entry into discourse on issues of homelessness that affect the whole of the US.
UNZIPPED also follows the initiative of a new shelter in the community, including opposing views against it. By contrasting the day-to-day challenges of the two struggling families with the arguably privileged shunning of a shelter by community members who voice concerns for safety, the film highlights just how complex it is to eliminate homelessness.
At the heart of the film is a message of humanity. Gray calls attention to hope, love, and progress through the two families. The greatest strength of UNZIPPED is that it listens: to community traditions of art and creativity in Venice, to those struggling; to opposing views with understanding, rather than contempt. This is a brave act of empathy, exemplifying the level of care that’s necessary to combat the issue.
In addition to creating space for discussion on issues that are threatening survivability across the States and other countries around the world, the #RaiseTheRoof campaign was launched alongside the film release. This gave room for impactful change to accompany the film.
UNZIPPED: An Autopsy of American Inequality can be streamed on Amazon, WaterBear, Vimeo, Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube, and Tubi. 10% of all film revenue goes to affordable housing and homeless advocacy organizations.
Read our conversation with Gray below on UNZIPPED, the #RaiseTheRoof campaign, and caring about our fellow human beings.
LUNA: I was really excited about this film, especially being from Vancouver. Housing affordability is a huge issue for us here, in addition to struggles with addiction.
GRAY: It’s interesting you say that because I feel like there’s this perception that Canada has a way more expansive social welfare net and does better with affordable housing. But there’s a huge affordable housing crisis in Canada. It’s really all over the world. I find it shocking that there’s such an issue in Canada. Growing up in Ottawa, there was a homeless man in my neighborhood, and that, in many ways, probably stuck with me. Maybe that was part of the genesis of this movie, because Ottawa is a pretty cold capital, and seeing him in the neighborhood wandering the streets in the middle of winter as a kid, I was like, “How is this possible?” Our local church would sometimes feed him and take him in but it was so mind-blowing that people could be homeless in a climate like that.
Sadly, it sounds like it’s become a much bigger issue. I know it’s a huge issue in Vancouver with housing affordability, and it’s all over the country now. In the States, it’s a massive issue. It’s complex and there’s no simple solution, but we were hoping with the film to humanize [the discourse by] centering the lived experiences of a few families that are struggling in one community. A local lens on this bigger national issue was the goal with the film.
LUNA: Is it true that it took six months to find those families?
GRAY: Yes! The original concept was to explore income inequality and use housing as a way to center the growing wealth disparity in America, because housing used to be such a driver of middle class aspirations and stability. Increasingly, housing was becoming one of the things that was driving larger wealth gaps and wealth inequalities in the country. So we thought, “What if we looked at different zip codes and embedded that with families in wealthy and poor zip codes in multiple states?” But that just felt so unwieldy. So we decided to find one zip code, one community that had vanishing affordable housing, rising home sales prices, and homelessness issues. That’s when it struck us: our backyard, Venice, California, 90291, which is one of the epicenters of the housing crisis in America.
Once we decided to go from that broader macro study to a more local lens for the film, the challenge was finding the families. It’s a big ask to let cameras into your life … to document it. So we worked intimately with a lot of frontline housing and homelessness organizations to let them know what we were trying to do and that we were trying to find some families. We also put flyers up around the neighborhood. I mean, we put this whole concerted effort into it. It was about six months of working with local groups and talking to people.
Eventually, we found William Attaway … through one of our producers who knew Attaway. I’d known him sort of peripherally — he’s a well-known artist here in Venice. I heard that he was struggling to stay in Venice after having launched his art career here. So I met with him several times, and I think once he understood our intent and that we were also going to talk to people who had very opposing viewpoints on solutions to the issue, [he agreed]. But we really wanted candid, warts-and-all access to a middle-class family struggling to survive in Venice, [and] they eventually [agreed]. It was literally the first day of filming with him and he said to us, “I just met this couple that’s living around the corner in a tent… They have two kids under the age of three. I told them about your documentary and they said they’d be willing to talk to you.” The next day, Nikol and DeShawn came around the corner with a stroller, and that was the beginning.
I think they saw that my heart was in the right place, I guess, is the way to say it. They trusted me to sort of document their journey. So we’d been looking for six months and suddenly, within two weeks, we’d found our families.
LUNA: Life has a way of doing that, of putting the right people together.
GRAY: It really does! (Laughs)
LUNA: I know that one of the goals of the movie was to make facts digestible, and in the film Rick Massey says that Venice is the second-most visited place in America after Disneyland. Hearing facts like this is what stuck with me the most.
GRAY: Rick Massey used to be a professional surfer, and Venice is known for being this diverse, eclectic community — it’s always been a surf and skate community, and although that wasn’t the subject of our film, we wanted to make sure we had some representative voices from [these communities]. Massey was one of them, and his comment really popped for me, too. Venice is this huge tourist destination, and I think its funky, eclectic community is what makes it so desirable and interesting. But that’s increasingly getting sanitized because of the forces of gentrification that have been pushing out a lot of the more diverse socio-economic families and communities that historically made Venice so cool.
It’s interesting that you bring up the statistics because I have to say, it’s a bit of an unusual mash-up in the film. Half of the film follows the families, and we didn’t know what was going to happen. We filmed for almost three years with them, and then we intermixed that with more traditional talking head interviews with different stakeholders. But then trying to contextualize this challenging, complex topic with key statistics to punctuate some of the things that were being said… It was a really difficult weave to find in post[-filming]. It was a difficult balance between just letting people speak in their own voices — we have no voiceover, no narration — and the text narration to help give context.
LUNA: There was also a map of Venice being built upon after each segment of the film. Did that come together in post, like you mentioned, or was your brain kind of working that out as you filmed?
GRAY: I think we had talked fairly early on about needing to orient the audience. As we got further into the edit, that’s when it distilled into, “We actually need a map!” What’s so surprising is that all the different viewpoints [in the film], all these different socio-economic perspectives and characters, were all within blocks of each other. It’s not spread across 10 square miles — this is three to four square miles. Most of the story takes place within eight blocks of each other. It feels like totally different worlds, and I think that’s probably the most shocking thing. You have the [separate] scenes of misery and wealth, and they’re often on the same city block.
I think for us to orient the audience like, “Here’s Nikol and DeShawn’s tent, here’s Attaway’s studio, and here are those two people who are leading the opposition to the construction of a homeless shelter.” They’re four blocks away. “Oh, and here’s the shelter — that’s two blocks from Attaway’s studio.” So it feels like different worlds, but they’re the same community.
LUNA: I think the map was so effective in making everything more impactful. You see the lines intersect, and it’s difficult but important for people to know what’s going on in their backyards.
GRAY: One of the real gifts of the movie was [realizing that] I had lived in Venice for almost 20 years [but] there’s this whole rich tapestry of community leaders and events that I had never been aware of. There’s the Cinco de Mayo parade with low-riders and music, and I had never gone to it. Seeing this incredible Latino tradition in Venice that I had never been aware of, making the film, allowed me to experience the richness of the community and all these different voices in the community. I only had my narrow perspective on what Venice was, and it really opened up my heart and mind to the depth of that diversity in the community.
LUNA: There was one scene in which Attaway took his children to a mural, and he was pointing out that he created it years ago. That artistic side of the film, these artists that you documented, it seems like they have such unique perspectives on the area around them. They have so much love for what they do despite their circumstances, and they have so much love for sharing that art. It sounds like you had a similar experience with the film being able to do that for you. Outside of UNZIPPED, as a director and an artist yourself, do you feel that art allows you to experience more humanity overall?
GRAY: 1000%! I’m so grateful for what I'm able to do as an artist and a filmmaker, especially as a documentary filmmaker. What a privilege. My job is to talk to people. and I feel that every person’s story and journey is fascinating. To be able to be invited into people’s lives and to have them share their hopes, their dreams, their frustrations, or their journey with their own art, their relationship to their community, their artistic process — what a privilege.
This was an interesting film for me because a lot of my films have taken me around the globe. I’d never made a film in my own backyard. This film is a love letter to Venice, even though I’m highlighting the challenges and tensions that are straining the community cohesion right now. It is a love letter to the hope and promise of Venice and in some ways, the hope and promise of America that there can and should be more equitable and fair housing solutions that also translate into the distribution of wealth and how we take care of each other.
To center that in my own community was such a joy to be able to experience. It was also one of the hardest films I’ve ever made because every day we’d walk three city blocks and be in homeless encampments filming vitriolic opposition to common sense housing solutions. Then we would leave the homeless encampment and these people who shared their stories. We had the privilege of walking away. A lot of them really appreciated the chance to be able to share their journey, often getting very emotional. But then we would have the privilege of being able to go to our houses and have a shower and a hot meal. It was a really hard disconnect.
We became friends — these are our fellow human beings and citizens. When [it would rain] or when a cold front would sweep in, you’d be haunted by the knowledge that there were fellow citizens that were sleeping out in the street in those conditions. It’s tough to leave that behind and be comfortable in your little home when you know there are so many people struggling so desperately in your own community.
LUNA: There was a comment by Nikol. She said that so many people forget that individuals living on the streets are human beings. It reminded me of a professor I had once who said something along the lines of, “Homeless people are the only people that we treat as optional.” That has always stuck with me because it’s just so true. I see that a lot here in Vancouver.
GRAY: It’s a very raw thing. There’s a comment in the film from one of the young homeless gentlemen who described being excommunicated. I get it, it’s so complex, but there’s something profoundly off and wrong about it. Venice is known as Dogtown. That’s its nickname. Every other house in Venice has a dog and I am a massive dog lover. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on a walk and a dog is missing. A dog comes running and people literally stop in the street and get out of their cars. “Whose dog is that?” “Who does it belong to?” The world stops to help the dog. I’m a dog lover, I love that. But we all walk past fellow human beings who are sleeping on the street.
LUNA: That’s such a wonderful image to bring in to compare.
GRAY: We should stop and help the lost dog, but what about the lost humans? And I understand why some people are fearful. There’s this desire to clean up, but first of all, where are they going? If you sweep them from your neighborhood without providing shelter and housing, they’re just going to end up in someone else’s neighborhood. It always comes back to [the fact that] they’re fellow human beings and citizens, first and foremost.
Another big myth is that, in California at least, everyone says they all come from elsewhere because we have the warm weather and we have shelters and we’re attracting the problem. That has been proven to be a huge myth. There was a big UCFS study that found 92% of the people who are homeless are from the area they’re homeless in. Most of them are not addicts, but the longer you’re on the street, the higher [the] chances are that you’re going to start turning to some sort of medication or anesthetic to deal with the crisis you’re in. This is all to say it’s a very challenging topic but we need to be looking at more comprehensive, long-term solutions.
LUNA: #RaiseTheRoof was a campaign that launched alongside this film. Could you tell me more about that?
GRAY: The film isn’t particularly prescriptive about solutions. We certainly allude to them, but it’s more of a case study about one community struggling with this housing crisis and humanizing the lived experiences of families and people who are at the frontline of this housing divide. So we hoped that the film would catalyze discussion. It’s one of those films that everyone sees differently. But I think it’s one of those films where you come out of it and almost need to talk to someone about it. We’re hoping that [means] people would want to learn a bit more, maybe even get involved and take action.
So we always knew that there would be the film and an impact campaign. We found a wonderful partner, Plus Media Solutions, to help us build this impact hub and launch our affordable housing campaign called #RaiseTheRoof. The hub is a simple way for people to take some simple steps. There’s a community learning guide that we created where you can host your own screening and do a discussion whether you’re a high school, university, or community group that wants to dig a little deeper.
There’s an interactive zip code tracker where you can type in your zip code and get connected to housing organizations in your own community. Whether it’s someone who needs services or someone who wants to volunteer or donate, it’s a simple way to [find information]. There’s also ways for people to volunteer. There’s an art campaign where kids can express what home means to them. So we wanted to create this resource center where people could get involved and take action because to even begin to start solving this complex issue, it’s going to require all of us to roll up our sleeves and lean in a bit more on trying to find solutions that fit each of our own communities.
LUNA: Another major part of this film is how much art informs understanding. Whether it was understanding people, understanding the community, or understanding the film itself, art has everything to do with it. Could you talk about that?
GRAY: I’m really excited about some of the music we had in the film. Our composer, Leo Z, is so talented and had to capture a range of moods and tones. There’s a song from Nikol, the very last piece in the film. It was actually a track from Nikol! She’s an aspiring musician and had created this track that was just gorgeous. There’s some wonderful musical collaboration in the film.
Also, artists are often the vanguard and then the victims of the gentrification tsunami. They help make a place cool. They go where there’s affordable rent, they create community, they create happenings, they create their art there, but then that attracts cool cafes, restaurants, and suddenly housing prices go up. Then the artists are the ones who are the first to be pushed out of those cool communities. So the original intent wasn't to find artist families to profile, but it’s just organically part of what Venice is. So both families happened to be artistic, and it was a perfect way to look at the changes happening in our community. Art is a very central theme that runs through the movie.
