By Stephanie Dillon
Eight years after Matthew Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City forced the country to look directly at American poverty, the machinery it exposed did not slow down. It refined itself. Rents climbed. Evictions accelerated. The process became quieter, faster, and more administrative. The consequences, however, became harder to ignore.
Set across Houston, this film enters the system where it actually lives. Not in policy language or statistics, but in courtrooms, hallways, apartments, and the fragile geography of lives already stretched thin. It follows families on the brink, advocates navigating a structure designed to move cases rather than solve them and officials attempting to reconcile the letter of the law with the human reality the law produces. For most Americans, this world remains invisible until the moment it arrives at their own door.
The film makes the system legible. It reveals how thin the line is between stability and collapse, and how quickly anyone can fall through it. What emerges is not simply a story about housing. It is a story about what happens when institutions step back and ordinary people step forward. In the narrow space between law and conscience, citizens attempt to slow damage already in motion. The question the film leaves us with is simple and uncomfortable: who gets left behind, and who decides that leaving them there is acceptable?
The film, currently in production, is directed by Giorgio Angelini and David Usui, with Chris Pine and Ian Gotler producing under their Barry Linen Motion Pictures banner.
Supporting the film is Harbor Fund, a not-for-profit, VC-shaped film fund built around a simple idea: culture moves through story. Patrons of social impact cinema donate to Harbor, which then takes an equity position in a slate of carefully curated films designed to move culture on critical social issues. Profits from the films are reinvested into their evergreen fund, sustaining and expanding the impact storytelling mantle.
Harbor exists to help filmmakers bring authentic, artistically ambitious work into the world by connecting artists, cultural leaders, and philanthropic partners who believe cinema can move the public imagination forward. Their work is not confined to a single issue, genre, or type of film. What unites Harbor Fund’s projects is a belief that honest storytelling can shift how we see the systems around us and, in doing so, move culture- sometimes quietly, sometimes powerfully- toward something better.
Left to Right: Jefferson Moss (Executive Director of Utah’s Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity), Lindsay Hadley (Co-Founder & CEO, Harbor Fund),
Ian Gotler (Co-Founder, Barry Linen Motion Pictures), Amy Redford (Advisory Board Member, Harbor Fund), Chris Pine (Actor, Co-Founder, Barry Linen Motion Pictures), Giorgio Angelini (Documentarian, Evicted)
This film embodies that mission. By illuminating a system most people never see until it touches their own lives, it does more than document a crisis. It reveals a structure that has been operating in plain sight all along.
Because culture rarely changes through policy alone.
It changes when a story makes something impossible to ignore. ☐
Images courtesy of Harbor Fund
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