A group of Houston housing advocates take a moral stand against an eviction system engineered to serve landlords, exposing a legal machine built for the rich disguised as justice.
Every day in this country, millions of people go to work, often holding more than one job, and still fall behind. Housing costs have outpaced wages for decades, and for many families, keeping a roof overhead has become the central pressure of their lives.
Set in Houston and inspired by the Pulitzer Prize–winning book Evicted by Matthew Desmond, this documentary follows parents, children, court workers, and advocates as they move through a system that often feels impossible to keep up with. Housing instability rarely announces itself publicly. It lives in private, shaped by silence and shame. This film brings those experiences into the open, showing how common the struggle is and how much strength it takes to face it. At its core, the film asks a simple question: when the pressure builds and options narrow, who stands with you?
ACCOLADES
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction
New York Times Best Seller/10 Best Books
TIME Magazine's Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade
National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
President Barack Obama's Best Books of the Year
MATTHEW DESMOND
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER / AUTHOR
MATTHEW DESMOND is a professor of sociology at Princeton University. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he joined the Harvard Society of Fellows as a Junior Fellow. He is the author of four books, including Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book
Critics Circle Award, Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.
The principal investigator of The Eviction Lab, Desmond’s research focuses on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality, and ethnography.
Desmond is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award. A contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Desmond was listed in 2016 among the Politico 50, as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.” His latest book, Poverty, By America, was a #1 New York Times Bestseller.
GIORGIO ANGELINI
GIORGIO ANGELINI came into film from a longer, multi- faceted career in the creative arts, including music and architecture. His directorial debut, OWNED: A TALE OF TWO AMERICAS came out of his interest in architecture and housing policy. The film made its television premiere in 2022 on Independent Lens/ PBS and was viewed by over three million people.
His second film, 2020’s FEELS GOOD MAN, premiered at Sundance where it went on to win the Special Jury Prize for Emerging Filmmaker, as well as a News & Doc Emmy for Best Research in Feature Documentary. The film documented the trails and tribulations of cartoonist Matt Furie, creator of Pepe the frog. Having found his work co- opted by far-right internet trolls and neo-nazis, the film followed Matt as he fought to take back control over Pepe and regain his artistic agency.
His latest project, THE ANTISOCIAL NETWORK, was released on Netflix in April 2024 and was a Top 10 film across the globe.
Giorgio studied American History at the University of Texas, Austin and received his Masters of Architecture from Rice University.
DIRECTOR
DAVID USUI
DAVID USUI has been working as a documentary filmmaker and cinematographer for over fourteen years. His work has appeared in The New York Times, PBS, ITVS, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and VICE.
David co-directed IN TRANSIT, with legendary documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles. The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017 and won the Special Jury Prize for Best Feature Documentary. Following the stories of various travelers along Amtrak's legendary "Empire Builder" route, from Chicago to Seattle, the film received sweeping praise for its poignant portrait of the American experience, earning a NYTimes Critics Pick.
In 2009, he co-founded Lost & Found Films, producing documentary and commercial content with brands, ad agencies, broadcasters and NGOs. His debut solo-feature documentary, BEEN HERE, STAY HERE, tracking the story of a small island community of fisherman, rapidly losing
their home due to rising sea levels, comes out in 2025.
David studied philosophy and environmental studies at Western Washington University and is currently an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
DIRECTOR
BARRY LINEN MOTION PICTURES
BARRY LINEN MOTION PICTURES is a Los Angeles- based production company founded by long-time friends and collaborators Chris Pine and Ian Gotler. They seek to champion both emerging storytellers and established filmmakers alike, producing resonant, timely material designed to entertain and enlighten audiences.
Their project list includes ALL THE OLD KNIVES, a spy thriller starring Pine, Thandiwe Newton, Jonathan Price, and Lawrence Fishburne, for Amazon Studios; DOULA, a heartfelt, comedic feature about a young couple and their eccentric male doula, for Universal; MY HEROES WERE COWBOYS, a documentary short about legendary horse trainer Robin Wiltshire, for Netflix; and the Ambie award-winning original sci-fi podcast AD LUCEM. Pine and Gotler also co-wrote and produced POOLMAN, Pine’s directorial debut starring Annette Bening, Danny DeVito, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and DeWanda Wise.
PRODUCERS
CONTACT US
evictedthefilm [at] gmail.com