Students in the graduate documentary film program regularly travel far and wide in pursuit of the story. But Elizabeth Lo hardly had to leave campus for Hotel 22, her short but jarring journey exploring how some Silicon Valley homeless navigate the night.
The title of the film—a selected short at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival—refers to the 22 bus line, which runs between East San Jose and the downtown Palo Alto Caltrain station on Stanford's doorstep. For many, its route matters far less than its schedule: The 22 runs around the clock, providing a few hours' escape from the street for the price of a ticket.
Not that it's much of a haven. Lo's shots show hunched-over riders, eyes gripped tight as an automated voice reminds them to refrain from using cell phones. And even that imperfect peace can shatter in an instant.
In the film's most disturbing scene, Lo's camera frames the face of an elderly African-American man who sits in his wheelchair while a drunk commuter hurls racial slurs at him and other black riders on the bus.
Lo first heard about the Hotel 22-phenomenon from another student, but the stark reality still took her aback, she says. Many of the homeless riders were old. Others had jobs but still couldn't afford housing. Some had grown kids with no idea of their plight.
Just dealing with the lurching and rumbling during six nights of filming left her feeling exhausted and battered, she says. Doing it for years, like some of the people she met, would be debilitating.
"If you spend years of your life sleeping—or not sleeping—on a bus, what does that do to you as a human being?" she says. "How do you function?"
Lo's film is boiled down from 30 hours of footage, and she says she's considering making a longer version. The eight-minute original has already gained the attention of organizations ranging from the New York Times, which hosted the film on its website, to community organizers, who have asked Lo to take part in a panel discussing issues addressed in the film.
