DVD- Dark Days
€24,95 Original price was: €24,95.€19,95Current price is: €19,95.
In the late 1990s, the young director Marc Singer traveled from London to New York in search of ‘the tunnel dwellers’ – New Yorkers living underground about whom numerous horror stories circulated. The horror scenarios about cannibals and serial killers turned out to be untrue. Singer did, however, meet “ordinary” homeless people in the dark tunnels who had found a better home underground than they thought possible above the ground.
Some have lived there for twenty-five years and can manage in a temporary shelter with electricity tapped from the overhead wires. Singer’s crew consisted of the tunnel residents themselves, who spent two years with him, speaking candidly about their background and documenting their tunnel life with him in beautiful and dark black and white images. The American sample composer DJ Shadow provided the fantastic soundtrack.
DARK DAYS, a groundbreaking documentary from British director Marc Singer, shows a way of life that is unimaginable to most people. The film, which features a moving soundtrack from DJ Shadow, focuses on a group of homeless people that live deep underground in an abandoned New York City railroad tunnel. During the daytime they scavenge for food on the streets of New York. At night, they retreat to the tunnel where they have built homes out of scrap metal, plastic, and plywood. The residents have electricity, furniture, and working kitchens, not to mention community, comradery, and the support of each other. Some of them have lived in the tunnel for 25 years.
Shot in vivid black and white, capturing both the grit (chicken wire, concrete walls, ramshackle shelters) and the honesty (the residents have hit rock bottom and admit it) of the tunnel, Singer’s film consists of candid conversations with tunnel dwellers, who are intelligent, funny, optimistic, and above all, human. One man confesses that he once had a wife and a child, and that he lost both to his drug addiction (crack cocaine), while one teenage boy living in the tunnel explains that he was abused by his family in Florida and simply ran away, finding life in the tunnel more redeeming. In the film’s emotional, understated conclusion, Singer, who actually resided in the tunnel while making DARK DAYS, turns to New York City’s Coalition for the Homeless for help.
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Description
DVD: Dark Days
Released: 2000
Language: English
Running Time: 84 Min.
DARK DAYS Award-winning portrait of the unimaginable existence of homeless people in the New York subway tunnels.
DARK DAYS explores this surprisingly domestic subterranean world, unearthing a way of life unimaginable to those above. Through stories simultaneously heartbreaking, hilarious, intimate, and off the cuff, tunnel dwellers reveal their reasons for taking refuge and their struggle to survive underground. Filmed in striking black and white with a crew comprised of the tunnel’s inhabitants and scored by legendary turntablist DJ Shadow, DARK DAYS remains a soulful and enduring document of life on the fringe.
Extras:
-The Making of Dark Days (2000) interviews with Marc Singer, DJ Shadow, and others.
-The Tunnel Today director Marc Singer revisits the tunnel in 2011.
-Fragile Dwelling an all new photo essay featuring photographs by Margaret Morton.
-Dark Days -Design a look at the typography with title designer Jay Hillyer.
-Life After the Tunnel an update on the characters .
-Introduction with former New York City Mayor David Dinkins and Q&A with Singer and Executive Director of the Coalition for the Homeless Mary E. Brosnahan at the Maysles Cinema in 2011.
-Orginal theatrical trailer.
-Deleted scenes with notes by Marc Singer.
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