Street Smart
2016 · 3m · New Zealand
Directed by Leigh Minarapa
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
Regina Tito reflects on life on Wellington's streets and how homelessness looks from the inside.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A sincere first-person documentary about homelessness—exactly the kind of well-meaning social-issue short that gets programmed to death at festivals, which tells you everything about why I'm passing on it.
Tito's reflective voice-over and Wellington's streetscape create a formally restrained portrait that sits comfortably in the observational documentary tradition, though without enough formal surprise to distinguish it from its peers.
The decision to let Regina speak directly, unmediated and unadorned, rather than construct a typical doc narrative around her—that's the entire film, and it's enough; her cadence and specificity of memory do the work that archive footage and music cues usually have to do.