top of page

"Housing is a Human Right"
short film | in production | Director, Director of Photography

After taking over a vacant, developer-owned house on Magnolia Street in the historically Black, actively-gentrifying West Oakland neighborhood, Moms4Housing organizers tell the story of the Oakland struggle for housing as a human right in their own words. Overnight the Moms became a national lightning rod for the plight of so many people living with skyrocketing rents and fighting to retain their right to home. The film considers the Moms' Black feminist networks of care they enact in order to sustain the right of Black, and therefore all oppressed residents, to Oakland and its political and cultural legacy as well as its future.

Scene Select from "Housing is a Human Right"

The film team is a collaboration between Moms4Housing and a group of graduate and undergraduate researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, called the Archive of Urban Futures and led by Dr. Brandi Summers. We are a small team: a filmmaker, oral historian, housing justice organizer, and supporting production and interview assistants. I work as a Director, Director of Photography, and Co-Graduate Lead for our research group.

Our film investigates the networks of care and justice that culminated in and outlived the famed occupation of the developer-owned house on Magnolia Street by the Black housing-insecure mothers of Moms4Housing in 2019. Our film picks up in the aftermath of the action that catapulted the Moms to national fame when they took over a vacant house in the historically Black, now actively gentrifying West Oakland neighborhood to protest the financialization of housing and homelessness crisis in the Bay Area. Their rallying cry sparked a national conversation and copycat actions around their central demand, that no human being deserves to live on the streets while housing is a commodity held in manufactured scarcity – Housing is a Human Right. Beyond the spectacle of direct action, our film asks: what are the lineages of care and struggle that produce and carry on well after spectacular political action for the right to space? What are the Black feminist place-making practices that the Moms have enacted in order to maintain community and memory in the face of Black displacement in the Bay Area? Through our collaboration, we contribute to the Moms4Housing goal of building the capacity and imagination of Oakland residents to secure housing as a human right.

Part popular documentary film, part research film, we employ a film geographic approach with the following methodologies: oral history and life history interviews, ethnographic filming, site-specific geographic history filming, collective coding, participatory footage viewing, feedback, and editing.

 

Through the visual and intimate language of documentary archiving, we have been able to reckon with the housing justice struggle as one grounded in intimacy, care, and family. Our documentary archives show that home is not only the site of wealth accumulation and a point in the statistical count of home ownership by racial/ethnic/gendered group, but also and importantly a stronghold of community longevity, a setting in the arch of family lineage, a node which tethers spatial meaning-making to a place.

screenings,
news,
collaborators,
credits

1 / Screenings
  • 9/20/23: University of California, Berkeley Geography Department Colloquium: Film Selects Screening and Archive of Urban Futures Presentation

  • 4/26/24: University of California, Berkeley Multicultural Community Center: Archive of Urban Futures Research Showcase: Film Selects Screening & Archives of Urban Futures Presentation

  • 6/2/24: Oakland Museum of California: Film Selects Screening & Archives of Urban Futures Presentation

3 / Film Credits
  • Director: Clara Pérez Medina

  • Producer: Dr. Brandi Summers, Archive of Urban Futures

  • Producer: Moms4Housing

  • Director of Photography: Clara Pérez Medina

  • Lead Oral Historian: juleon robinson

  • Editor: Clara Pérez Medina

  • Production Team: Cat Summers Stoehr, Angela McMahon

bottom of page