Moving Pictures

BY JOE NOLAN, FILM CRITIC

One Night in January: Counting the Cost of Homelessness’ title is a reference to a national census of homeless Americans that’s organized annually to attempt to count the number of people experiencing homelessness in a city on the coldest night of the year.

The count is required by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development in the last week of January in order for cities to get federal funding toward housing.

The title also points to the dollars and cents that are currently wasted by not creating much more cost effective systems and structures to provide affordable housing and healthcare to the more than half a million Americans who call the streets their home. There’s nothing surprising about the content of this new documentary produced and directed by filmmaker Stephen Newton, but his non-linear approach to story and editing brings an impressionistic sense to what might otherwise be just another preachy, pedantic movie about nagging social problems that never seem to improve or change. The movie was set to release to theaters this year, but due to the global pandemic One Night in January is now available for free on YouTube.

The movie features all the talking heads you’d expect to see in a documentary about homelessness: preachers and protesters, politicians and housing experts, and interviews with a number of homeless and formerly homeless men and women. Again, it’s not a question of what makes Newton’s film special, but how he takes familiar elements and arranges them in unexpected ways to keep a conversation about economic disparity and affordable housing engaging and even emotionally moving. Newton relishes in bouncing in-and-out from big picture interviews with prominent national experts to intimate chats with regular folks wrestling with

Newton interviews Noam Chomsky about American feudalism in the 21st century, but he also talks to homeless veterans in East Tennessee, and affordable housing activists right here in Nashville. Newton rightly demonstrates how both of America’s major political parties disparage the poor and create policies to undermine the people’s social safety net in favor of creating an economy by and for big business interests. He also gives viewers a first hand look at homeless lives lived in burned-out, litter-strewn camps, and scattered along highway exits across the country.

Newton’s film is disarming because it never feels like there is an agenda behind the camera, but the director still manages to make the point that putting homeless people into housing and ensuring that they receive primary, preventative medical care would ultimately cost far less than we’re currently spending to

criminalize their presence in urban spaces, and to fund the emergency medical treatment that becomes the go-to option for people living at the margins of society. The director talks with housing and medical experts about how willful ignorance among politicians is far more costly than addressing homelessness directly, but then it brings the receipts by demonstrating the success stories he finds in storefront churches and small scale not-for-profit housing projects in East Tennessee.

The most novel insight in Newton’s film is the role that trauma plays in homelessness: 92% of homeless women with children report childhood trauma from abuse and neglect, histories of alcohol and drug abuse, and/or domestic abuse. The film questions how the early diagnosis and treatment of trauma might affect outcomes in terms of keeping people off the street in the first place.

How might trauma education and treatment affect the living situations of the more than 60,000 veterans who currently call the streets of American cities their home? The film demonstrates that the economic precarity of American life in the 21st century can mean a slide from employed and housed to jobless and homeless in as little as six weeks. In the middle of a global pandemic, at the beginning of a Greater Depression, how steep will that slide get before our political will can match the economic and moral good of acknowledging housing as a human right in the richest and most powerful country in the world?

Watch One Night in January: Counting the Cost of Homelessness at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=gE5G0zuEKtw