Throngs of people shuffled into Chinatown’s Great Star Theater early Wednesday evening for a documentary premiere directed by two of the Bay Area’s most recognizable faces.
Mario Riveira and Abraham Woodliff made a name for themselves through their videos. Riveira, mario0o0o0o0o0 on Instagram, makes man-on-the-street style interviews like, “What’s the Bay Area’s favorite word” while Woodliff, handle realbayareamemes, makes topical selfie videos skewering the Bay’s wealthy elites and localized memes for long-time and first-time residents alike.
The pair initially connected for a 15-minute video on Treasure Island gentrification.
“We went to Treasure Island and nobody was fucking talking to us,” Woodliff said with a laugh when talking about the beginning of the project during a pre-show interview.
From there, the directors expanded the scope to an ambitious hour-long documentary about one of the most talked about, and least understood topics of the region if not the country: gentrification.
“Abe just threw this out, City of Sensitive Frauds… People in the city are fake as fuck,” Riveira said of the applicable and incendiary title The City of Sensitive Frauds. “People are fake progressives, they care about certain topics but when it comes to housing and low-income families they get put to the side,” he said.
With a sly smirk, Riveira admits, “We’re just trying to piss people off with the title.”
“That’s the thing, people come from all over to San Francisco to be progressive, to look like good people and a lot of these people are rich people. But their presence actually displaces people and makes them shitty people, even if their intentions are otherwise,” Woodliff said.
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Wednesday’s premiere was the culmination of eight months of work for the directing duo. It also marked a step out and up for the pair as both are well-known for their humor as much as their commentary.
“Clowns on the internet, they come and go but if you can make someone cry or make something with real passion, you can be in the game forever,” Riveira said of the change in tone with this project.
Woodliff echoed Riveira’s sentiment on the shift. “I look at me and Mario working together like clashing of the titans like me and him both have these big social media platforms and followings and if we’re gonna come together we should do it in a big way and that’s why we took this movie more seriously, we cover more serious subjects.”
For a decade plus, gentrification has been a media fixation in the Bay with cable, print and online news approaching the issue from almost every conceivable angle.
Unlike other approaches though, The City of Sensitive Frauds tells the story of gentrification from the perspective of those being pushed out, not those moving in.
Riveira starts in earnest with a voiceover explanation of San Francisco’s “original sin” as it’s described in the film, the so-called redevelopment of historic Harlem of the West, the Fillmore District in the 1960s. Then the pair moves quickly into interviews with local activists and agitators like Gunnagoesglobal and Dogtowndro for an authentic look at the effects of gentrification on the city’s Black and Brown neighborhoods like the Fillmore and the Mission.
Gunnagoesglobal attacks gentrification as “psychological warfare” designed to “whiteout blackness” and when the camera pans around the historically Black Fillmore District it’s clear he’s right. Dogtowndro discusses how gentrification increases the violence directed towards Black and Brown original residents, recalling the horrific case of Alex Nieto to demonstrate his point.
The interviews are broken up by former District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston’s keen analysis of how gentrification happens.
It starts, no surprise, with money and developers. Wealthy, corporate developers buy up property in low-income neighborhoods and force evictions through any number of insidious and manipulative tactics (like the process of renovictions which they discuss in the film). Once the original residents are gone, they tear down the original building and slap together a polished steel earth-tone high-rise for market rate (usually a decent increase from the previous rent).
The movie then steps back and transitions into a discussion about gentrification in the Bay Area as a whole, interviewing residents at the camp on 12th Street in East Oakland and a camp on San Pablo Ave at the now derelict 1/4 Pound Burger Joint. Residents at both encampments offer harrowing stories of how they got there but echo the same general point: They’ve been abandoned and criminalized by city officials who view them, not as human beings, but as a blight on polite society.
Of the several striking takeaways, one of the biggest was the reclamation of humanity for people that’ve been otherwise cast aside. The directing duo offers evicted people a chance to tell their story, thus bringing back the quintessential humanness to those that deserve it most. The revitalized perspective is harder to find now as Bay Area politicians clamor over themselves to seem more moderate, and couldn’t have come together without Riveira and Woodliff’s staunch independence from the calcified media giants of the Bay.
“I love that I’m independent. I wanna show people that you can do shit … independently,” Riveira told me during the interview.
That independence shines through in the film as both directors take on some of the biggest money in the city: the landlords. As you’ll see in the movie, the fault of gentrification lies at the feet of conglomerate landlords like Veritas and Mosser, with bought and paid for politicians like London Breed and in the hands of the city’s homegrown anti-affordable housing movement the YIMBYs.
“Money ruined this place, and you need people to make content that’s not beholden to big money in order to take the region back,” Woodliff said.
Beyond the expert commentary from locals, the class-based analysis and the hilarious irony the film outright rejects the standard media takeaways about gentrification, namely the shrugging inevitability common from local legacy publications (“If it didn’t happen here, it’d happen somewhere else.”) The movie rejects the inevitability of displacement and offers a vision of the future where you can work a normal job, just one, and afford rent in the city. It opens the door to a different future, one not controlled by landlords and corporations.
As Riveira said, “We’re building something but I wanted to do this to show people in the Bay Area that you can make this shit happen, you don’t need a ton of money, a ton of funding. You just have to have the passion and the balls to fucking do it and people will show love and show up.”
