Dark Days
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DVD details
Artist: Marc SingerDVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 88 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-08-26
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Lions Gate
DVD Reviews of Dark Days
DVD Review: It takes hard work and ingenuity fo live in a subway tunnel
Summary: 5 Stars
This documentary won three separate awards in the Sundance Film Festival in 2000. I can well understand why. At that time there was a whole colony of homeless people who lived underground in the subway tunnels in New York City. It was dark and damp and full of rats, but yet they preferred it to a homeless shelter. There, they erected their personal shacks and struggled for survival, venturing out to forage in garbage cans for food as well as for stuff to sell. British Producer Marc Singer was so fascinated by these people that he ventured into these tunnels and spent two years getting to know them. Eventually he wound up living with them and made this film, using the homeless people themselves as crew.
The film is unique in that it shows these homeless people as human beings and the viewer gets to know them as individuals. Yes, many of them have drug problems, but they still have lives, hopes and dreams, a tough will to survive and often a sense of humor. They manage to cook meals on makeshift stoves and there is a feeling of camaraderie among them. We also see their ingenuity with the very little they have. And realize that their days are full of hard work just to survive. The conditions they live in are absolutely squalid. But this is their home.
During the course of the film, Amtrak decided to rid the tunnels of the people and homeless advocates negotiated for them to be placed in real housing. By the end of the film we see them in real apartments. There is an upbeat quality to this ending of the film.
However, the DVD is much more than the actual film. There's a 40-minute interview with the filmmaker, Marc Singer, which is equally as fascinating as the film. I hadn't realized that he was a non-professional person who had never made a film before. He spent all his money on a camera and had to learn how to load the film. He became obsessed with making the film, and became homeless himself after starting to edit the more than 50 hours of film he had shot. There were many delays and setbacks but eventually the film was made and received many accolades.
On the DVD we also get to find out what happened to the many individual homeless people who we got to know through the film. A few had died but most of them had moved on and were leading more productive lives. It felt good to know this and to realize that Marc Jacobs had really done a tremendous good deed by merely making this film. I applaud him in every way. And I also applaud the film. Highly recommended. Especially on DVD with the added features.
More Dark Days reviews:
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Description of Dark Days
For two years Marc Singer lived with the people who make their home in the tunnels beneath Penn Station in New York, creating an unflinching portrait of a part of society that is literally and figuratively beneath our notice."You'd be surprised what the human mind and body can adjust to," says Tito, one of the tunnel dwellers. He and his neighbors are homeless, but the tunnels offer them a degree of safety that doesn't exist on the streets above. In this strange place they manage to achieve a remarkable degree of domesticity, building shelters, keeping pets, and cooking meals.
Singer has an eye for telling images, such as Dee dragging a sofa along the train tracks like Sisyphus rolling his stone in Hell. With its grainy black-and-white photography and haunting soundtrack, this is a surprisingly beautiful film, but it is never sentimental, nor does it try to impose a false nobility on its subjects. Dark Days simply shows us a world that we never knew existed, and in this simplicity lies its power. --Simon Leake
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