Melinda Raebyne’s Stories of Us: Camp Second Chance has good intentions, but it’s the wrong kind of documentary about homelessness at the wrong time.
On a quest to truly understand what it’s like to be homeless, Raebyne quite literally embeds herself for a bitter-cold winter week at Camp Second Chance, a sober encampment in Seattle that shelters about 50 people at any given time in tiny homes and tents.
During the course of her stay, she interviews her neighbors in the freezing cold conditions. Their stories are genuinely moving, and each illustrates one of the many paths that lead to homelessness: lost jobs, health care bills, break-ups, untreated mental health issues, and addiction. Nearly every person she interviews thrives at Camp Second Chance, thanks to the structure and stability the camp offers.
But I wanted to know much more about them than I wanted to know about Raebyne, who makes herself the star of the film, as any actor-turned-documentary filmmaker might be tempted to do.
In a series of confession booth monologues, Raebyne complains about the cold, tearfully admits to feeling ashamed of being perceived as homeless in public, and cries in a fit of frustration and anger at the injustice of living in a society that permits elderly people to sleep outside in the first place.
All of that is totally right and good and true. But in 2019, four years after Mayor Murray declared a state of emergency on homelessness, we don’t need documentarians to “expose” the fact that sleeping outside in winter is terrible, or that Seattleites routinely ignore and dismiss and demean the thousands of people who sleep in tents every night, or that people are frustrated with a lack of action on the homelessness crisis. I understand and see the value in “meeting people where they are,” but you have to be pretty disconnected from life to not understand that sleeping in a tent in the middle of winter for weeks is almost completely unbearable.
At this point in The Conversation on Homelessness, Raebyne's supposedly selfless display of endurance comes off as self-serving. Even the mad dads at Safe Seattle think it’s cruel to pursue policies that keep people on the streets. They want to shelter people who sleep outside, too! They just want to house them on an island far, far away and inject them with methadone.
Also, some of the information is a little off. In one of her closing gestures, Raebyne shows a little montage of Senate Bill 5946 passing. The bill exempts temporary shelters and transitional encampments, such as Camp Second Chance, from environmental review. Camp residents provided powerful testimony in committee and helped provide input on the legislation itself. But the bill, sponsored by Sen. Joe Nguyen, died in the House. It’s a good bill, but the documentary makes it seem like a done deal. The words "it passed" flash across the screen. But it didn’t actually pass, and the measure isn't included in the budget as a proviso. Not including that context makes it seem as if lawmakers have addressed this issue when they really haven’t—not, at least, at the scale the issue requires.
Rather than serving as a humanizing antidote to the schlocky, inhumane, misleading, poorly written, and annoyingly scored local news special, Seattle Is Dying, Raebyne’s Stories of Us feels like the other side of the same coin; warm-hearted poverty tourism instead of cold-hearted, fear-mongering prison propaganda.
Anyway, I’m not saying Raebyne should get out of the business. There's some good storytelling here. Maybe next time she can embed herself with a broader array of social workers providing homelessness services so that people can really know how it feels to be working on the issue every day while the rest of the well-off city complains that you need to do more with less money.
Stories of Us: Camp Second Chance screens this Saturday and Sunday at the 45th Seattle International Film Festival. Check out The Stranger's complete SIFF schedule here.
