I like your new restaurant, but n
This documentary weaves the truth about gentrification today with a history of capitalist spatial planning
As much as Not in My Neighbourhood is a film that takes its viewers to the frontlines of the global battle against dispossession, police brutality and gentrification, it is not a dour or aesthetically limited film. In fact, it may perk you up a little, correct your posture and have you looking at that new neighbourhood development with new eyes.
Directed, written and partly shot by filmmaker Kurt Orderson, it weaves a thread between three locales — Cape Town, São Paulo and Brooklyn (New York) — creating an intercontinental dialogue that highlights the similarities and connections between disparate diasporic struggles.
Orderson, who was born in Cape Town and now lives in New Orleans, first came across the term gentrification when he saw graffiti in Harlem: “Gentrifiers, get out of our neighbourhood.”
This film is an expression of how he has come to understand this complex issue; its ties to capitalism, racism and spatial planning.
Orderson is not content with keeping you a complacent spectator. He gets tactile when presenting the potency of memory and its connection to ritual and place.
Fuaad Isaacs, filmed in a house in Philip Kgosana Drive, Devil’s Peak, Cape Town, that he may soon have to vacate because of soaring rent prices, shares an anecdote about the especially festive nature of eating at the time of Ramadan. He remembers how, as children, they loved boeber, a sweet, milk-based drink that he tries to offer to his filmmaking visitors.
Later on in the film, we see him travel back to his former family home in District Six near Cape Town’s city centre. It is an open piece of land. Here, he traces the structure of his family home from its remnants among the shrubs, remembering the stoep and specific rooms.
Orderson says he was partly driven by a desire to depict how people grapple with recollections from their lives. In these particular scenes with Isaacs, one gets a sense of a recurring trauma, helping you to realise that what you are witnessing are a people that have been twice wronged. Apartheid forced them to establish new lives. Once they did, capitalism and its ties to race and class has come again, like a hurricane, to displace them.
About the juxtaposition of the three locales, Orderson says he sought to represent how differently and similarly people dealt with the resemblances in their struggles.
“South Africa and Brazil, for instance, share a lot of similar cases of trauma, in terms of the psychosis that society is still grappling with, you know,” he says. He’s in Egypt, for the screening of his film at the Luxor African Film Festival. “In terms of the colonial footprint that was left behind and how the masses are still trying to find a healing process, specifically around land and access to land, and access to private urban property.”
What he also captures are the juxtapositions. In São Paulo, for example, we see seasoned activists speak about how, as part of different organisations with a common purpose, they co-ordinated the occupation of a prominent residential tower in that Brazilian city.
The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST), a homeless workers’ movement based in Brazil, uses loopholes in the Constitution to occupy buildings and lessen the housing backlog. Text on the screen tells us that, although the city believes there is a deficit of eight million homes, MTST believes there are five million units available. Occupation then becomes a direct confrontation with the city and its housing policies.
Ivaneti de Araújo, a leader in the organisation, is charismatic as she walks through the building, introducing various roleplayers and letting us into her own history of struggle.
The more she speaks about her history as a farm labourer, the more you realise that she is being autobiographical. When asked about her early childhood, her vulnerability returns and she cries and asks for the camera to be turned away.
In Cape Town, we meet activists forced to develop a voice to deal with the untenability of their living situations.
We observe Charnell Commando from Bromwell Street in Woodstock, an old inner-city suburb, grow into an activist, leading a protest at the Old Biscuit Mill, a site of gentrification that has seen longtime residents being pushed out with promises of “temporary relocation”.
Images show people enjoying