Please join Mt Baker Meaningful Movies, First Church Meaningful Movies and Independent Lens for our upcoming event on January 18th at 6:00. We will be screening the film “Razing Liberty Square” on our Meaningful Movies Maestro Channel located at: https://maestro.tv/indielens/meaningful-movies-project. After the film, we will have a community conversation on Zoom located at: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84322063054?pwd=UWxOQjJIUG53cS9ubXd0MWRHY2ZUZz09.
This will be Part 1 of a 2 part event on gentrification and homelessness. Part 2 will be held on January 21st at noon. That event will be hybrid and will be held in person at First Church in Seattle, WA as well as on Zoom. (More details coming soon.) At that event we will talk about Razing Liberty Square and we will discuss the film, Stories of Us: Camp Second Chance. Both films will be used as a springboard for a conversation about gentrification, homelessness and climate change.
Description of Razing Liberty Square:
Liberty City, Miami, was home to one of the oldest segregated public housing projects in the U.S. Now with rising sea levels, the neighborhood’s higher ground has become something else: real estate gold. Wealthy property owners push inland to higher ground, creating a speculators’ market in the historically Black neighborhood previously ignored by developers and policy-makers alike.
Description of Stories of Us: Camp Second Chance:
STORIES OF US: CAMP SECOND CHANCE introduces director Melinda Raebyne, as she embeds herself one winter at one of Seattle’s homeless camps, Camp Second Chance, challenging public ignorance and humanizing a population that locals would rather neglect, sharing with you some of their personal stories and her actual experience of what it’s like to be homeless. By putting faces to the statistics and a voice to their stories, she humanizes a population in ways that allow viewers to see themselves and better relate to a neglected and often “forgotten population.”
What’s possible when society’s “forgotten population” decides to beat the odds and instead of putting hope into a broken system invest their hopes in each other, using the pains of their past to be the fuel that drives them to create a better tomorrow. Camp Second Chance is an encampment founded by the homeless to foster an environment that allows them to become productive people in society. “Stories of Us” is their story and ours, one of triumph, showing us that the power lies within our own willpower not to just survive but to thrive.
“Stories of Us” was awarded the Turner Legacy Award by Meaningful Movies Project in 2020 and the Audience Choice Award at the Tacoma Film Festival.