In conversation with award-winning director Colin K. Gray

This month, we sat down with documentary filmmaker and screenwriter,? Colin Keith Gray ?to talk about his experience of making UNZIPPED, a searing exposé of the growing affordable housing crisis in America.

Brought to you by Executive Producer?Lucy Liu, this intimate documentary focuses on one of the country’s most iconic and increasingly income-divided zip codes, Venice CA 90291.?

UNZIPPED focuses on local stories that raise awareness about a global issue, why did you focus on Venice Beach?

We wanted to document the lived experience of people struggling to survive in the most prosperous country in the world, while also highlighting the heroic front-line service providers who are developing and implementing solutions.

Our search took us to our own backyard, iconic Venice, California 90291. Once a mecca for artists, outsiders and a thriving Black community, Venice’s home sale prices and rents have skyrocketed in the past decade, affordable housing has vanished, and homelessness has increased dramatically. Meanwhile many of Venice’s original diverse community members, including artists and black and Latino families, have been gentrified out of the neighbourhood.

Venice is now the frontline for America’s heated battles over affordable housing, gentrification and homelessness and, we believe, an essential community for UNZIPPED to shine a light on in order to humanise this global issue.

What was the moment or the story from the ones you shot that made you feel the urgency and importance of making such a documentary?

It’s hard to pinpoint one moment. UNZIPPED has been the most challenging film I’ve ever made.

But I will say that filming the first Town Hall meeting when Mayor Eric Garcetti and Councilmember Mike Bonin presented their proposal to build a homeless shelter in the Venice community really drove home the incredible emotion and importance of the issue. Although Venice is ostensibly a progressive community politically, seeing the amount of fear and vitriol that was directed at these two politicians was eye-opening, and underscored the urgency of documenting the range of emotions around the housing crisis. The local statistics speak for themselves. When we started filming, one in six renters was behind on rent, and 82 per cent were people of colour. There were also over 1,100 homeless citizens living on the streets in Venice. With a population of 41,000, this meant one out of 40 people in Venice was homeless.

Most shockingly, an average of?three homeless citizens die every day?on the streets of L.A.

Suffice it to say, everywhere we went we felt a sense of urgency while making this film. UNZIPPED is a local lens on an urgent national and international issue.

As this feature film includes very personal stories, how much were the main people filmed included in the process of the documentary and could give their input on how they were portrayed?

For the first part, our entire team worked with one of our local housing services providers, Safe Place For Youth (S.P.Y.) to understand and fully embrace the philosophy of ethical storytelling. Some of the core ideas are that, as filmmakers, we need to be conscious of protecting the well-being of vulnerable people while documenting their stories & journeys.

It is important that the people in these vulnerable populations don't feel pressure to share their stories, and?that they feel empowered to own their stories?even after they’ve been shared with a film like ours.

To do that, our team went through an ethical storytelling workshop and we prepped extensively before we filmed any of our local homeless citizens. Our local housing services partners would then alert the local community that we were making a documentary about the issue so that everyone had advance notice. I would then go into the encampments prior to filming (without cameras) and start building relationships and partnerships with some of the local homeless citizens.

A documentary about such a challenging topic can affect you greatly. Did you ever question whether to continue shooting?

It was a long five-year journey making this film. But it was worth every ounce of effort that our entire team poured into making it a reality. There were certainly moments when we wondered why we decided to tackle such a complex subject. Complexity often makes a problem seem insurmountable. But our housing crisis is too important to ignore. So whenever we doubted ourselves, or we ran out of money, or we were heartbroken by the scenes of misery we were documenting on Venice’s streets, or we were outraged by some of the anger and indifference we encountered from our neighbours, we just supported each other and soldiered on.

On a more personal note, I can’t tell you how many times?I cried when I got home from filming(safely ensconced back in my comfortable home while we knew people were barely surviving outside on the streets).

I still cry every time I see the finished film. I think my overall sense of outrage has grown the longer we’ve worked on UNZIPPED. The housing crisis is also a moment of opportunity; there are abundant resources in this country to solve this issue. This cannot and should not be a partisan issue: that’s what kept us going, even in the dark times and in our moments of doubt.

What do you wish people would take from this film?

We made this film because we wanted to cut through the abstract statistics and divisive rhetoric to remind people that

these are actual people, and actual communities, being torn apart by the?structural inequities of our housing system.

If community members work together, we believe the housing crisis can become an opportunity for systemic change. When families have stable, safe, and accessible homes that they can afford, they are better able to maintain employment, perform better in school, and achieve improved health and well-being. Our hope now is that UNZIPPED will help catalyze debate and action to support the growing movement to enshrine housing as a human right.

Impact Spotlight

The impact campaign?#RaiseTheRoof?is part of the film launch and acts as an urgent call to action to create more equitable housing solutions for every community and family in America and around the world.?Be part of this important movement?by directly supporting the families and individuals in the film; buying art from the profiled artists or finding volunteering opportunities around you.

Learn more about how you can help on their website:

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