"Abandominium" is an observational ethnographic film that chronicles the shared domestic life of four heroin injectors who live together in an abandoned building on the west side of Chicago. The film follows Steve and Pam, the homesteading married couple who run the house, and their housemates, Ida and John, as they work together to forge the best possible existence in the face of tall odds against them. This film explores the domestic lives of unhoused drug users and dissects a central property of street-based drug use culture: antagonistic communalism.
Directed by Greg Scott
Greg Scott is a visual sociologist and filmmaker at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. For the past 20 years he has been making documentary films about street-level drug markets and drug user cultures, concerns, and communities in the United States. Greg is co-founder of the Journal of Video Ethnography, the first-ever journal to publish peer-reviewed ethnographic films, and the Ethnografilm Festival in Paris, France.
Mary Rose lives in a Dene community near an abandoned mine that produced 7 million ounces of gold but left 237,000 tonnes of arsenic behind. Her community has to worry about this toxic legacy of the Giant Mine forever.
This short film emphasizes the religious or sacred basis of discrimination and one modern instance thereof, where caste members literally have no way to participate in the traditional Indian search for marital partners.
Wesley Shrum is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Video Ethnography...
A film exploring the realities of a system of exclusion via the Criminal Justice System affecting the African American community. The focus is on drug laws from the 1970’s taking a national prison population of 300,000 to 2.5 million. The Children’s Defense Fund stating, “1 of 3 African American ...
