“We Live in Public” shakes you by the throat to force you to intimately understand homeless life from the struggling, downtrodden and fiercely resistant perspective of those living it. It’s a militant, radically progressive view of the street, and for anyone who hasn’t spent time sleeping in encampments or squatting alongside people in crisis to hear their stories first hand, it is a loud wake-up call.
An unusual mix of academic lecturing and from-the-gut accounts and poems by unhoused people themselves, the theme is centered around the sprawling Aetna Street encampment in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, dismantled loudly and controversially in 2023.