'Lead Me Home' review: Two American filmmakers look inwards, at poverty in the US

'Lead Me Home' is a 40-minute documentary on homelessness in America. (Image: Screen grab)

Hawai’ian poet Juliet Kono writes, impersonating a homeless man’s mother in her poem Homeless (From the collection Tsunami Years, 1995):

“These days, in order to catch a glimpse of him,

I circle the city. One day,

I see him on his bike.

People give him wide berth,

the same way birds avoid power lines,

oncoming cars or trees.

I park on a side street.

Wild-eyed, he flies the block

as if in a holding pattern.

Not of my body, not of my hopes,

he homes in on what can’t be given or taken away.”

He could be Patty or Zia or any of the nameless characters we meet in Lead Me Home, a 40-minute documentary on Netflix. It’s a distilled capsule of three years of filming by Pedro Kos and John Shenk, both known for their immersive rigour and a genre of documentary filmmaking that’s refined and ripened over the past few years across the world: Show not tell, but as opposed to just a home-video style candidness, a study of cinematic contrasts in which framing and camerawork add aesthetic grist to augment the point of view that the filmmaker has on a certain reality.

Kos and Shenk are pioneers of the genre. Shenk is the director of Lost Boys of Sudan (2008) about a group of more than 20,000 boys of the Nuer and Dinka ethnic groups who were displaced or orphaned during the Second Sudanese Civil War, and the Oscar-nominated An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, following up An Inconvenient Truth on the climate change conundrum; and Kos directed Rebel Hearts (2021), about a group of nuns standing up to an oppressive cardinal, a Sundance favourite, and Bending the Arc (2017) about global health equity.

Lead Me Home is a breathtakingly sad film. It is also a big moment in the way Western cinema projects poverty—often as with an outsider’s eye on countries where poverty is routine. So the triumphant and heartwarming part about Lead Me Home is that two American filmmakers look inward, into their own poverty and street corners where human beings strive and scramble for a life without hunger. They look inward unflinchingly, but with an empath’s gaze.

On any given night, over half a million Americans experience homelessness, we’re told—a paltry figure compared to many Asian or African nations. Based on interviews and research gathered over three years, they give out some prophetic nuggets: In the next few years, America can expect “a tsunami of homelessness”.

The film follows a group of homeless people in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. A woman pregnant from a rape, a transgender who came out in her senior year of college at 19 and lost all family support, couples who have met on streets and who plan dates on public laundromats, jazz dancers and janitors—some of these people have been molested, stabbed, shot and run over, and they live thinking they will leave their shelters and cars and tents one day and find home.

The film’s opening sequence establish the template Shenk and Kos work with: Set to eerie music, they zoom in from establishing aerial vistas of the city to windows and street corners at dawn. Lights come on in skyscrapers and we see silhouettes of human beings brushing their teeth, drinking from cups. Then the directors move to close-ups of people getting out of fluttering tents parked on pavements and doing those exact same things. Moving from panoramic cityscapes exploding with vertical development, time-lapse photography of urban clusters to intimate interviews at frayed edges of these cities, the film is a poetic and dignified look at the poverty of the world’s most influential nation.

By making this gritty, emotionally rich film, Shenk and Kos seem to be restating what Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, the world’s leading poverty experts and Nobel-winning economists, have emphasised over and over again in their writing—that economists and in turn most nations tend to adopt a notion of wellbeing that is too narrow, a notion predicated on income or material consumption, but that a fulfilling life needs respect of the community, comforts of family and friends, dignity, lightness and pleasure.