New York Dispatch. 6.

Looking back almost a week away from the event itself, a recurring theme at the Tribeca Film Festival was poverty, an odd theme in the limo-locked gilded ghetto of Tribeca at an event that gets so much money from New York State and from private sponsors, but a theme well worth exploring nonetheless.

There's the old line, "God must love poor people, because he makes so many of them," and poverty in this country comes in many forms, most of them invisible in the mainstream media. Dan Lohaus looks at the problem of homelessness among recent army veterans in the doc When I Came Home. Lohaus shows us a number of veterans living from hand to mouth, but the one we see the most is Herold Noel, who came back from the recent gulf war with a chest full of commendations and not much else. He has a car and a child and an angry wife who yells at him over the phone. We don't know how he makes payments on his red SUV, but it doesn't leave him with much else to spend. Noel is one of at least 100 homeless vets in New York City, by this film's reckoning, and that's just counting the homeless vets from the recent Iraq invasion, so we can probably assume that there are more.

In a cold gray New York winter, we follow Noel from office to office, to housing project, and back to the street, all filmed in TV news style, with lots of emotion in between visits. He's prescribed drugs by the Veterans Administration for Post-Traumatic Syndrome Disorder. He avoids the homeless shelters to avoid crime. He meets other vets, particularly a woman with a child who is angrier than he is, and ends up refusing to talk to reporters about her situation because nothing's improving. Eventually, much of that anger, and there's plenty to share, goes into booze and spousal abuse. No surprise. And this is just the beginning.

Noel is more determined than a lot of his peers. He also has some guidance. With the help of a veterans' group called "Operation Truth," he starts a media campaign which succeeds in getting his story to the newspapers and network television, and eventually to politicians. This not your typical soldier's story.

What is all too typical is the atmosphere in which Noel is forced to seek help. Agencies created to help veterans are under-funded and bureaucratic. Well-wishers like the rapper Chuck D, whom Noel meets, leave him with the advice to get out of New York and move to place that's less expensive. When all else fails, Noel considers the unthinkable - re-enlisting in the army. He's told that he won't qualify, since he suffers from PTSD.

There are other veterans in the film from earlier wars who tell the same stories. "It's thirty years later - half of us are dead," says a Vietnam War vet who has watched other veterans spend years in neglect. A clip from a speech has W saying solemnly, "We will always honor their sacrifice." I'm sure that "Deferment Dick" Cheney would have a similar nostrum for the cameras. If you doubted that the wars being fought by the US today have a socio-economic balance, When I Came Home should clarify that. There are some 500 homeless Iraq war vets now, we read on the screen at the end of the film. Multiply that number a few times over the next year or so. The number of homeless vets from previous wars runs to 500,000, someone pointed out. That sounds high, but it's certainly not as inflated as the "support our troops" rhetoric. As the election gets closer, you'll hear more of it.

MAQUILAPOLIS: city of factories is a look inside the sprawl that has oozed out from Tijuana around the maquiladoras, the manufacturing plants that line the Mexican side of that country's border with the United States. You might call them sweatshops now, albeit modern sweatshops that can be established or abandoned in a matter of days. These are the plants providing employment that were supposed to keep Mexicans in Mexico, close enough to the United States to make importing products a cheap and easy job, but not on American soil. It didn't quite work that way. Illegal immigration has increased many times since the plants were established in the 1970s. Based on what we see in this documentary, life on the border near these plants is a good enough reason as any to leave. The pressure to produce anything from clothing to televisions at the lowest possible price is fierce. The pressure to keep unions out is far greater. Pollution is at lethal levels, although regulations are minimal and enforcement is non-existent.

As happens frequently with such docs, the directors, Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre, have chosen to follow people who are more than mere victims, so we walk through abandoned factories with smart practical women who are determined to prevent the pollution there from harming those around it. Carmen, another worker, is fighting to get severance pay from the firm that employed her. These young women analyze the situation well. They are workers who can be replaced by companies that can also decamp to locations where labor is cheaper. And the companies are attracted to places like Tijuana by government giveaways, legal and illegal. The result is a network of factories and urban slums that you can see throughout Latin America - more factories in places like Tijuana than in "less fortunate" cities - where people arrive and create huge settlements without water, sewers, or any services at all. This is the architecture of subsistence, the bricolage of people who fled rural poverty for urban squalor. Anyone who's following the immigration debate should see this film for the reality check that it provides to the argument that investment in Mexico provides good jobs. It should also remind you of what you're paying for when you shop at Wal-Mart, if there are any Mexican-made products still being sold there.

Now click on to read David D'Arcy's interview with Fernando Solanas, whose The Dignity of the Nobodies, "a tour of the human landscape shaped by Argentina's economic crisis of the late 1990s, a journey through devastation," screened at both the Tribeca Film Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival this year.

Posted by dwhudson at May 13, 2006 5:33 AM