Long Story Short

In Long Story Short, over 100 people at homeless shelters, food banks, adult literacy programs, and job training centers in California discuss their experiences of poverty - why they are poor, how it feels, and what they think should be done. Numerous interviews are stitched together to form a polyphonic account of poverty told from the inside. While individuals filmed in separate spaces appear in isolation, words flow across the screen like musical ensemble, moving across a social body of common experiences and variations on shared themes, as narrators momentarily join together, and then splinter apart offering the possibility of a fragmentary imaginary collective.