RAGS TO PICTURES
HOMELESS MAN WHO BECAME FILM DIRECTOR
HUNGRY and scared, teenager Rotimi Rainwater’s life was literally in the gutter.
For nine months, after quitting the navy to care for his cancerstricken mum, he slept on the streets... in a park, or under a bridge.
He knows the pain and the uncertainty of being homeless.
So who better, after an amazing rags to riches tale, to bring that message to the big screen?
Rotimi, 47, is now a film director in Los Angeles and he returned to the streets to shoot Lost In America, highlighting the plight of homeless young people.
He also recruited a string of A-listers to the project, including rocker Jon Bon Jovi, 56, singer Jewel Kilcher, 44, and actresses Halle Berry, 52, and Rosario Dawson, 39.
Rotimi was born in in Banbury, Oxfordshire, and ahead of the film’s UK launch, he said of the celebs: “I was impressed by their authenticity and their openness to it. They were vulnerable, they really shared their emotions. It was incredible.
DANGEROUS
“I want people to start a conversation about homeless youth worldwide. The streets is the most dangerous place in the world.
“Whatever you’ve experienced, the rejection, the abandonment issues, it stays with you. The worst thing was the rejection, which has stayed with me. It was knowing I had family who could have helped.”
Rotimi moved to the US from Britain when he was seven. In 1990, aged 19, he left the US Navy after his mother Margaret was diagnosed with lung cancer.
He explained: “She had been fighting substance abuse her entire life – pills and alcohol. I was the only one to take care of her. She had lost her apartment and was living in a hospice. I went to my gran’s but she refused to help.
“I had nowhere to go and she told me the shelter downtown served good pea soup on a Wednesday.”
After six months of living rough in Orlando, Florida, Rotimi’s car was towed away and he ended up sleeping under a bridge. But he kept it secret from his mum.
He said: “I’d visit her in the morning and ask to use her shower, telling her I’d been out partying. I’d eat her breakfast or lunch when she wasn’t hungry through the chemo, basically just to survive. We had a difficult relationship, I was the son of an addict, but at least I had her.”
Rotimi got two jobs – in a restaurant in the day and as a cleaner at Disney World in the evening.
He was offered a place to sleep, met a woman from the film industry and landed work as an assistant on the Wesley Snipes movie Passenger 57. Rotimi, a big James Bond fan as a kid, never looked back. After his mum died in 1993, aged 47, he moved to Los Angeles and worked his way up in the movie industry – focusing on social issues.
The father of two made a feature film called Sugar, loosely based on his experiences on the streets.
For Lost In America he met 30 young people living rough. Some were abused as kids, others were bullied for their sexuality. Their experiences on the streets were equally grim.
And there was tragedy too. Rotimi explained: “It’s been painful. We’ve lost people. There’s Kiki, a girl who lives in the shelter.
“She had a boyfriend at the time named Cameron. Last year he was sleeping in a railway cart in Colo-
The streets are most dangerous place in the world ROTIMI RAINWATER FILM GURU ON LIVING ROUGH
rado. They didn’t know he was in there and they poured coal in the cart. They didn’t find his body until they took the coal out in Texas.
“Every kid I met, I would share my story with them. I’d squat and sit on the dirt or the concrete.
ENRAGE
“My crew would ask if I wanted a towel to put down and I’d say ‘No, I’ve slept on places like this before’.
“I want this film to make people question the way they view the homeless and I want it to engage and enrage people enough that they stand up and say: ‘We can’t allow this. This has to change’.
“In any country, youth homelessness is not going to be fixed by government, not by the people and not by corporations. It will be fixed if all three work together.”
Oscar star Halle Berry, who lived in a shelter in her 20s, backed Rotimi.
She said: “Some 325,000 kids are at risk of sex trafficking in the US.
“The average age of a child forced into sex trafficking is 12. One in three homeless youth will be lured into trafficking within 48 hours of leaving their home.” Pop star Miley Cyrus’s Happy Hippie Foundation focuses on helping young people living on the streets and with LGBTQ issues.
She also backed Rotimi’s movie and said: “Everyone deserves a safe place to call home.”
The film contains stark statistics about the outcome for young people on US streets. The sad trend is reflected in the UK, where the number regularly sleeping rough rose from 1,800 in 2010 to 4,800 last year. At least 86,000 young people asked their local council for help between 2016-17 due to fears about becoming homeless. And a report into hidden homelessness by the London Assembly suggested almost 250,000 under-25s had stayed in an unsafe place.
Lost In America has its UK premiere at London’s Raindance Film Festival on October 4 and 6.
Rotimi said: “It means the world to me to be able to come back to the UK and try to give back and inspire these youths. I’ve experienced everything they’ve had to do to survive and I want them to know it’s possible to get on your feet and do whatever you want.”
vikki.white@mirror.co.uk www. raindance.org/festival/
I want film to engage and enrage people so they insist on change DIRECTOR ROTIMI ON BID TO FIGHT HOMELESSNESS