Bay of All Saints was well-received in its world premiere at Austin's SXSW Film Festival. Bay of All Saints is a beautiful, compassionate film that allows those of us with so much more a chance to look inside the lives of some of the poorest of the poor. This is a hidden world that we all know at some level exists, but which we rarely allow ourselves bear witness to. There have been a number of films in recent years that capture extreme poverty in the developing world including Which Way Home (child migrants in Mexico), Garbage Dreams (Coptic garbage workers in Cairo, Egypt), and Iron Crows (Bangladeshi ship yard recyclers) among others. Bay of All Saints follows the lives of 3 families living in shacks on stilts overlooking the Bay of All Saints in the city of Salvador in Brazil's Bahia province. Their desperate poverty is contrasted with the beauty of the gorgeous bay that they live along. The film follows their lives over a period of 6 years as they struggle with their desperate poverty. During this time, the Brazilian government with money from the World Bank promises to clear the slums (in order to build a boardwalk for tourists) and build them new subsidized public housing, but the project and the hope that it represented is delayed in the morass of Brazil's bureaucracy and corruption. The poorest of the poor rarely have a voice in any society. Annie Eastman's eloquent film gives them a small voice that they can attempt to raise to tell the world that they exist and their suffering shouldn't be ignored. I hope that film is widely viewed by all who believe that everyone has the right to live in dignity. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that the political will can be built to help these families and the hundreds of millions of others who live lives of quiet desperation. But every voice raised in protest is a small step in the right direction. A film like Bay of all Saints at least allows us a view of the humanity of the desperately poor who are so often ignored and forgotten.
