Filmmaking from Below

With Bowery, directors MIKE MINTZ and IRAD STRAUS practice filmmaking as an act of following. They trail their subjects—the homeless on the streets of New York City—through struggles with drug addiction, mental illness, secure employment, inclement weather, and eventually the events of Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter uprisings.

“We kind of melted into the background,” said Mintz at Bowery’s London premiere, referring to the directors’ non-interventionist approach and the film’s organic process. “We never went with a plan because you couldn’t plan a film like this, at all, you couldn’t even plan the shots.” None of the on-screen monologues are provoked and about half of the film takes place underground. What results is a powerful depiction of life in New York’s underbelly. In this focused and intimate feature, Mintz and Straus position their camera at low angles or eye-level to make a point about spectatorship; the audience is compelled to meet the gaze of the film’s subjects, thereby dignifying them. Bowery—cinematically, politically, materially—captures the city from below.