Zack Russell, a filmmaker from Toronto, saw a news story on his phone about individual shelters shaped like big shoe boxes for unhoused people.
He emailed the carpenter “and asked if he wanted me to make a film about it,” said Russell. “And he said no.”
Zack Russell, director of Someone Lives Here. The film won two awards at Hot Docs 2023. Photo credit: Zack Russell
But three years and one film later, they won two awards at Hot Docs Film Festival: the Bill Nemtin Award for Best Social Impact Documentary and the Rogers Audience Award for Best Canadian Documentary.
The film, Someone Lives Here, can be seen today online until 11.59 p.m.
Someone Lives Here official poster.
The carpenter who built the tiny shelters, as he called them, is Khaleel Seivwright.
Russell filmed Seivwright for a whole year, but his involvement with housing started some years before in Vancouver, where Seivwright had been living in a tent.
“It was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done,” Seivwright said in Someone Lives Here.
That is, according to the documentary, one of the reasons why he decided to create these units.
A tiny shelter in a Toronto encampment during the winter of 2020/2021.
He showed in the film the structures could house one person, including a smoke detector and a fire extinguisher.
Seivwright was able to build the shelters with donations from an online funding campaign.
The City of Toronto, however, opposed wooden structures on city property and applied for an injunction to stop him from building them, which ended in a settlement a few months later.
A press release from the city about the settlement states: “These wooden structures are not legal dwellings and the City’s Parks Bylaw and Streets Use Bylaw prohibits camping and placing tents or structures on City property,” as well as citing safety concerns.
“On February 17, 2021 one person died in an encampment fire that involved a wooden structure,” the city hall said in a statement.
Russell said Seivwright is not giving up in his struggle to provide housing.
“He’s still wanting to work with the city, and he still wants to find a solution,” he said.
Russell said Seivwright is working on a model that would provide homes for multiple people similar to the ones created by A Better Tent City, an initiative that provides affordable housing for bigger communities.
But he also said the problem is “there’s just no housing for people.”
“There’s no affordable housing. There’s no public housing,” he said. “And it’s a massive societal problem.”