STREETS TO SCREENS
Toronto Public Space Committee fundraiser
The Mayor of Tent City
(Canada, 2005 • 53min)
Director: Rosalie Bellefontaine • Producer: belladonna productions
Friday August 31
7pm • Bloor Cinema • $9
Karl Schmidt is an ex-East German soldier, former fruit farmer, and once-successful contractor. Personal tragedy, bad luck, and worse circumstances found him alone and homeless on the cold streets of Toronto at the end of the millennium. Instead of entering the already-overburdened shelter system, Schmidt builds his own makeshift shelter on a toxic industrial brownfield along a desolate stretch of the waterfront. Using discarded construction materials and his own ingenuity, Schmidt would build the very first dwelling that would ultimately become Toronto’s notorious Tent City.
Footage of Schmidt’s life and times is intercut with interviews with the late Pierre Berton and NDP leader Jack Layton to weave a powerful portrait of one ordinary man’s extraordinary struggle against homelessness and poverty. Housing and poverty issues are public space issues; they cannot be divorced as easily or sorted out as neatly as some politicians might like. Moreover, doesn’t the ruthlessness with which city officials — public officials — destroyed Tent City call into question the very nature of what we are comfortable calling a “neighbourhood”? What does it say about or ability to accept “bulldozer gentrifcation”?
FILMMAKER IN ATTENDANCE
