To ignore someone’s hardship and suffering because it makes you feel bad is simply unacceptable. This is precisely what makes this film so brilliant. And then it made me think of how unethical it would be for me to ignore Justin and his story. It made me wonder how ethical it was for Hayes to film him. It was clear to me, that Justin was not just emotionally unstable, but that he suffered from severe problems with his mental well-being. I did not want to hear about Justin’s alcoholism or see him in such a vulnerable state. When I saw it for the first time, I wanted to look away. It feels jarring, emotional, almost exploitative. The scene concludes with Justin apologizing for his abrupt outburst.
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At one point, Justin lashes out at the filmmaker in series of expletives for having provoked him. Over the span of eight gut-wrenching minutes, Justin talks about his alcoholism, his loneliness, and his desire to be reunited with family.
Since there is no overarching protagonist, the focus of this film is flipped onto the viewer, who must sit through a series of hard to watch scenes.Įarly on, the audience is introduced to a homeless man named Justin who lives in South Salt Lake, Utah. Although Hayes said this was not a deliberate decision on his part, it is no accident that these are the only people given real speaking roles. The only people who speak (at length) in this film are those who are experiencing homelessness, and those who advocate for them. What makes this film interesting from a creative standpoint, is its lack of narration, and its lack of a central protagonist. And Hayes unleashes a flood of uncomfortable images of people being forcibly evicted from a makeshift tent encampment in the middle of a snowstorm. Through Troxell, the audience also learns that in the United States it is possible for someone to work forty hours a week and not make enough money to afford a place to live.Īt this point, the cracks in the figurative dam Hayes has built for viewers break. As Troxell explains, “they became condos, they became parking lots the YMCA got out of the business.” The term was accepted into common vernacular around the time when single room occupancies disappeared from the housing market. Viewers learn from an advocate named Richard Troxell, who is based in Texas, how the term “homeless” was coined. It starts first with a glimpse of the facts. Although Hayes will not admit to this, the story told here, in many ways, resembles Hayes’s own journey of discovery into the subject of homelessness. The film takes place nation-wide over the span of one 24-hour period to explain what Hayes says are the three major causes of homelessness (“the attack on affordable housing,” income inequality, and criminalization). What happened next is the subject of Hayes’s new film, “The Invisible Class.” It is the result of eleven years of research and thousands of hours of taped video and audio interviews. They later had a talk that would change Hayes’s life. For him, people as subjects seemed far more interesting.Īnd so Hayes approached a man he saw who was homeless in a park and asked the man if it would be all right to photograph him in exchange for some money. Instead of taking thousands of photos of the Golden Gate Bridge like all his other classmates, Hayes thought he could focus his project on something slightly more challenging. He was working on a photography project when he came upon a novel idea.
Josh Hayes stumbled onto the subject of homelessness almost by accident.
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