| Amelia Foster |
Dark Days plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, August 7th, through Sunday, August 9th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
In an era when Minneapolis desperately needs courageous leadership, Jacob Frey fails us again and again. During Operation Metro Surge, he took a press tour when he should have been protecting us from abduction and murder by ICE agents. He has literally run from constituents’ questions. He hides behind corrupt cops. He vetoes city council resolutions at a pace unprecedented in city history, using his “strong mayor” position to halt progress.
Frey’s failures as mayor are too many to count, so here I’ll focus on just one: his 2017 pledge to end homelessness in Minneapolis. He has followed this promise by pairing willful ignorance with a policy of cruelty enforced via encampment sweeps. Perhaps Frey has never been to Longfellow, Seward, or Phillips. Last year he claimed there were only 27 people experiencing unsheltered homelessness in the city. That same year he proposed a budget that would cut emergency housing vouchers and slash funds to the Stable Homes Stable Schools program that has helped hundreds of families with children afford their housing.
The city’s procedural guidance in response to encampments is a self-contradicting document. It declares “Everyone experiencing unsheltered homelessness is vulnerable and deserves dignified and respectful treatment protective of their rights.” The document then details the process by which encampments will be evicted, often without much (or any) notice. Those of us living in Minneapolis have witnessed the suffering caused by these sweeps time and again when people scatter across neighborhoods with their belongings in search of shelter. Last December, Frey vetoed a city council ordinance that proposed a public-health-oriented approach to encampments by increasing the minimum notice before eviction, providing portable bathrooms and handwashing stations, and reducing the destruction of personal property.
Existing city policy also states that, following a sweep, “property will be fenced to ensure no reoccupation.” This approach has resulted in a crosshatched network of chainlink that makes broad swaths of south Minneapolis feel like a compound. Fencing isn’t limited to former sites of encampments. When an encampment sweep is planned, other green spaces in the neighborhood nearby — such as the Nuevo Campo park pilot run by Lake Street Council as an attempt to enliven vacant lots where buildings burned in 2020 — are preemptively fenced off too. This fencing often stands for years, pushing pedestrians and cyclists into dangerous traffic and further bisecting communities already torn apart by freeways.
The sight of neighbors nodding out in the medians along Highway 55 fills me with despair. It has been widely acknowledged by advocacy groups and service providers that encampment sweeps exacerbate the harms of unsheltered homelessness. National Health Care for the Homeless Council’s 2022 report details how common practices of encampment removal destroy peoples’ vital documents such as driver’s licenses and birth records, jeopardize pathways into supportive housing, break supportive peer connections, and further traumatize people already coping with the stress of life on the streets. The city of Minneapolis must stop pushing people experiencing unsheltered homelessness further into harm’s way.
[mild spoilers ahead]
At risk of making a hard transition, since this is a film essay after all: Marc Singer’s documentary Dark Days (2000) presents an alternative, compassionate, and progressive vision for how to help those living on the margins. The film depicts an encampment community facing eviction, and yet it ends on a surprisingly hopeful note, showing the promise of providing housing first to those living in temporary shelter.
Shot in the mid-1990s, the project that became Dark Days began in collaboration with the community it depicts. While living in New York, curiosity prompted Marc Singer to befriend some people living on the streets in his neighborhood. He heard persistent rumors about people living in the tunnels. Those stories led him to explore the city’s underground, eventually acquainting himself with the community depicted in Dark Days. The tunnel documented in the film is located beneath Manhattan’s Riverside Park where 2.5 miles of old railroad tunnel between 72nd Street and 123rd Street fell out of use in the 1970s. After it was abandoned by the rail companies, more than 50 people found shelter there, building plywood structures or making use of brick and concrete rooms originally constructed for railroad employees.1
As Singer spent time underground getting to know people living there, he began to wonder how he might be able to help them transition to life outside of the tunnels. “No matter how badly people had fucked up their lives, they deserved better.”2 During a conversation about life underground, one of the residents remarked: “You know, somebody should be making a film about this.” Singer, having never operated a camera before, took up the charge.
Singer learned how to shoot while making Dark Days. He rented a camera on deep discount from a nearby shop where staff taught him to thread film. Residents of the tunnel became his film crew as they collaboratively solved production challenges. One built dollies to roll along the railroad tracks for tracking shots, which was no easy feat without power tools. Another tapped into streetlight electrical lines, enabling them to light the tunnel sufficiently to capture it on black and white Super 16mm film. Singer’s approach treated tunnel residents with dignity and kindness while also recognizing their skills as collaborators. As shooting wore on and money dried up, Singer worked with a developer to secure a donation of film stock from Kodak.
Singer was making a film, obviously, but the project held true to his larger ambitions. He hoped the experience of working together as a film crew would help build confidence in the tunnel residents, as he anticipated a day when they would seek employment above ground. And who knows, if the film eventually made a profit, maybe that money could help fund their transition to stable housing. Singer’s vision extended beyond his ethics and aspirations for the project to encompass everything from the graffiti-style title design to the DJ Shadow soundtrack. The result is a remarkable aesthetic achievement for a first time filmmaker.
An early shot in the film evokes the classic Western trope of a hostage tied to the rail tracks, as the camera pans slowly past someone lying on the rail in the shadows. But Singer is not an interloper angling to take advantage of someone else’s suffering for the sake of a film. In an interview with The Austin Chronicle, he said, “Somebody could be sitting on the tracks, and you know if they sit there long enough, they’re gonna get hit by the train. Now do I sit there and wait to film the guy, or do I put the camera down and get him off the tracks and then spend three hours trying to talk him out of doing it?”
Dark Days doesn’t romanticize life underground. It depicts drug use and addiction amidst ever-present rats and piles of trash. Residents gaze into the camera, or into the gloomy middle distance, as they recount their life stories. Many carry deep wounds from the trauma that led them to life on the streets. As harsh as the tunnel conditions are, residents note the relative benefits of finding shelter away from the daily indignities of homelessness above ground. As one resident put it: “It can’t be as bad as it is up top. You have kids fucking with you, police fucking with you… [in the tunnel] in wintertime I don’t freeze, summertime I don’t burn up.” In its unflinching, single-shot takes, Dark Days reveals the resilience of people finding a way to survive.
There’s a slice-of-life beauty to the domesticity on display in Dark Days, and stretches of the documentary feel a bit like a hangout film. Cooking and food, including how to guard your resources from rodents, are constant topics of conversation. The proper recipe for country cornbread is debated. Roommates squabble over dishes. Pets are fed and cleaned up after. People give each other haircuts. It’s human nature for the residents to take the time to get to know each other, joke around, and care for one another.
The film takes a sudden turn when an eviction notice from Amtrak gives residents 30 days’ notice to vacate. With help from local advocates at the Coalition for the Homeless, who take up a legal fight on behalf of the residents, a change for the better is suddenly within reach.
I won’t spoil the documentary’s conclusion entirely, but I will say that the contrast between the end of Dark Days and current practices enacted by the city of Minneapolis are painful to behold. Since I started writing this article, Frey has doubled down on his punitive approach toward our unhoused neighbors. Dark Days is proof that a housing-first solution was possible in mid-1990s New York, and yet here in Minneapolis, Frey displays a stunning lack of imagination while encampment sweeps perpetuate and amplify the homelessness crisis in our city.
Earlier this year, a huge graffiti tag appeared on the highway 55 sound barrier shortly before the city cleared another encampment. It read: “SWEEPS KILL PEOPLE.” This is true. As long as the policy of repeatedly bulldozing encampments persists, the city will continue to push vulnerable people deeper into precarity and crisis. Minneapolis has been through enough. Decades of abuse at the hands of MPD, the 2020 uprising, federal terror enacted through Metro Surge… I’d like to invite Jacob Frey to visit the Trylon and watch Dark Days. He might learn a thing or two from Marc Singer’s approach of caring for and honoring the humanity of people living in encampments.
Footnotes
1 Margaret Morton, The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City, The Architecture of Despair (Yale University Press, 1995).
2 The Making of Dark Days, directed by Singer, Mark (Palm Pictures, 2000), DVD, 46 minutes.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon
This was such a great read, Amelia. Using cinema to break down the actual, everyday mechanics of municipal authority makes the dread sitting over Minneapolis feel painfully real. Thank you for calling out the system so directly and showing how much these screen stories actually reflect what’s happening in our own backyard.