Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash

Just before midnight on November 18, 2016, Howard Allen, our unofficial guide to Nashville’s homeless community, takes us to a dark and secluded park. Since early morning, my director of photography, Jeb Johnson, and I have been filming Howard at several locations throughout the city. This is our last stop of the day. The park, located somewhere near the banks of the Cumberland River, is where Howard has been sleeping when weather permits. On the opposite shore, I can see the city’s far distant skyline shining like a glittering and unattainable Oz. In the park, there are no lights, only moving shadows. The scene feels surreal.

By the time we climb out of Jeb’s pickup truck and start setting up our equipment, Howard is already on his way into the park, where there are nearly thirty people camped for the night—all of them alarmed by our unexpected arrival. Howard quickly tells them that we are filmmakers working with him on a documentary about homelessness. But, at that time of the night, no one cares who we are or what we want. All they know is that outsiders with lights and cameras are sure to draw attention to them from the police, which usually means fines and jail time. Within two minutes, the temporary encampment, and all but one of its residents, has silently vanished into the night. We recoup and spend the next hour interviewing the one person who hadn’t fled with the others. David is in his fifties. He has been homeless for more than seven years. He is not optimistic about spending another record cold winter on the streets of Nashville.

Howard nods solemnly and adds that just surviving each and everyday is a struggle. “On the news tonight, they urged people to keep their dogs and cats inside because it’s going to freeze. Homeless people aren’t allowed into the city’s few shelters, until it’s twenty-five degrees. They actually care more about their pets than us.”

Homeless since 2001, Howard considers himself a poverty scholar and an activist. To bring attention to the plight of the city’s nearly three thousand homeless, he founded the Nashville Homeless Underground. Although he still lives in a tent somewhere in the city, he regularly contributes articles to Nashville’s The Tennessean and appears on radio talk shows and television. For many at City Hall, he is the Mayor of the Homeless.

The interviews go well, and we call it a day. Howard beds down on the ground. David, who has insomnia, settles on his bench, where he will spend the night doing sentry duty.

Later, I wake in my hotel room to the sound of thunder. I look out my window. It’s raining hard. While I am warm and dry, Howard and David are having a miserable night.

That night was not the first time in my decade as a filmmaker that I felt conflicted. Video camera in hand, I had access to people and places that I would not have had as a writer. But it was always difficult to remain an objective observer, while my natural inclination was to become involved—to try to save everyone.

In Susan Sontag’s On Photography, she notes that someone with a camera can often go places closed to others. “The camera is a kind of passport,” she writes, “that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed.”

Without realizing it, I approached both of my documentaries from a writer’s perspective—first asking “Why?”—and then, shooting until I had an answer. In many ways, the structure of both films resembles a nonfiction book. Each has a dedication, an introduction, and titled chapters that unfold the story, followed by acknowledgements and production credits.

That night was not the first time in my decade as a filmmaker that I felt conflicted. Video camera in hand, I had access to people and places that I would not have had as a writer. But it was always difficult to remain an objective observer, while my natural inclination was to become involved—to try to save everyone.

As a fiction writer, I intrude freely into the lives and worlds of my characters without permission or limitations, other than my imagination. But, as a filmmaker, I not only needed my subjects’ permission to tell their stories, but, their trust as well. For example, I made several visits to The Manna House, a long-term supportive housing program for chronically homeless veterans, before I was able to interview anyone on camera. It was the men’s stories of loneliness, PTSD, desperation, addiction, and years living on the streets after they left the military, that opened my eyes to the national crisis—not only for some 50,000 other homeless veterans, but for millions of Americans nationwide who had been forced into the streets. Homelessness was a problem I had ignored, trusting what politicians and the media had preached for years—that the homeless aren’t victims, but losers that prefer life on the streets over holding a job and being a contributing citizen

By the time my short film, The Manna House: Refuge from the Storm, was released in 2016, I was already working on One Night in January: Counting the Cost of Homelessness. For the next three years I followed the story across the country, and finally started postproduction at the end of 2019. Since its 2020 release at the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, the film has been screened at virtual and live festivals in the US, Canada, and the UK.

My journey from writer to filmmaker and back again made me a better fiction writer. I learned that, just as every image in a film must contribute to the story to sustain its viewers, every single word in a short story or novel must further the plot or lose its readers.

In the 2000 film, Shadow of the Vampire—based on the German director F. W. Murnau’s 1922 film, Nosferatu—Murnau, played by John Malkovich, says, as he is directing a scene, “If it is not in frame, it does not exist.”

For your consideration

In the film One Night in January: Counting the Cost of Homelessness, Steven Samra asks:
“If you were suddenly thrust into homelessness, what would you feel like?”

To create greater awareness about homelessness and its consequences, I invite you to write a 500 to 1,000 word essay in response to the above question.

Please submit your essay (Word document format) by January 30, 2023 to email razarmedia@gmail.com. All responses to be published at stephenanewton.com.