Sharp quote “you say you care about the poor? Then tell me, what are their names?” is often attributed to the Latin American liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez. How many of us truly know the names of those on the margins? Moses, a documentary about a defiantly optimistic unhoused man in San Francisco who goes by the name of the biblical liberator, is the closest thing to a cinematic articulation of the famous quote. Fran Guijarro’s feature documentary is one of the most empathetic and humanistic documentaries I’ve ever seen.
Moses Carbins has been homeless for two decades. He is an incredibly resilient, patient, and forgiving man who calls a bench outside of a Starbucks his “office”. It’s where he works all day, sitting and greeting people who give him donations, as well as much more. They give him purpose. The unhoused are usually invisible and that’s by design. To truly see them for what they are – as people – should disturb the masses to action. They are a “people behind a fog” and only the power of communication, as the protagonist tells us, or maybe more specifically storytelling, can defog our vision. Moses disrupts this pattern of invisibility with his warmth and his sincerity. People line up to talk to him, a man of the streets. Some commuters have known him for 20-plus years, and they exchange information about their lives like old friends.
Guijarro is Spanish and first met Moses while going to film school in the Bay Area decades ago. He made a film with in 2010, the short I Wish (2010), about a homeless man who sees the irony in people passing by him and tossing their coins into a tourist-trap “wish pond”.(The director also has the chutzpah to incorporate the short footage almost in full. The resourceful character makes his own mini-pond in order to help him in his work. The fountain they made for the film had real running water and the real Moses used it for a long time at this Starbucks office. That short film began their relationship and plays an important role in helping to facilitate and inspire Moses’s upward trajectory.
The filmmaker takes Moses seriously when he describes his situation using the language of fog. Pillow shots of fog blanketing over San Francisco texture much of the film, particularly in the beginning. The Bay Area is notoriously foggy and such significance can’t be missed: that a homeless man is especially concerned with the weather should come as no surprise. For the longest time, he had no escape from the climate. The film is also structured as if the fog of Moses’s life – especially the nosy curiosity of how he ended up without a home and without a family to support him – slowly lifts as we get to know him more.
Guijarro’s personal closeness helps get his camera so close that it might as well poke the subject’s nose. Moses is never physically far from the lens and that’s the plainest way to describe the style. The close-quarter camera work erases “the fog.” It teaches us much more than his name, to return to the quote; it teaches us his desires, his fears, his past, his inspirations, his story. Even the usually blurred or out-of-focus faces of others, presumably for consent-related reasons (especially since often the faces relate to others in extreme poverty), draw our eyes back to the face of the titular character. The simple cinematography is not particularly distinct or complicated, but it does the job perfectly.
One scene may break you if you let it. The original short film became a sensation in Spain and a festival invited him to the premiere. After a lot of hard work and volcano-induced cancellations, he finally gets to Spain. He visits the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid and cries standing before Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. Guijarro shows enough for us to know what prompts the tears, but after the establishing shot, the camera narrows back in on the face of the unhoused black man from America. They only care about his reaction to the painting. An extreme close-up blows up only Moses’s watery eyes. The museum visit is edited with the backstory of how Moses’s support systems collapsed under him, how he became estranged from his family, and how life conspired against him (and his country failed him) to the point that he is now without a home. “This is when I became invisible”, Moses says about almost burning down his marital home and losing his family. This story is his Guernica. It’s just in colour instead of black and white.
Moses premiered at the Malaga Film Festival.
