OAKLAND — Amir Soltani moved into his brother's townhouse eight years ago in a new West Oakland development touting itself as a bridge between "industrial and residential neighborhoods."
He had fled Iran as a child for a life of relative privilege in Britain and the U.S., where he attended elite colleges. Yet Soltani understood displacement and the outsider's lack of belonging. And he saw and heard something he could not ignore.
The clang clang of the shopping carts formed a spectral nighttime symphony as recyclers congregated from miles around. Some pushed loads of as much as a thousand pounds on rigs lashed together with street ingenuity. Their destination: Alliance Recycling.
Local residents had long clashed with Alliance, and transplanted professionals who bought into the townhouse complex were even more vocal in their displeasure. The sounds were cacophonous, and the cash disbursed for glass and aluminum pilfered from private cans was often spent on drugs, booze and sex in plain sight.
Soltani saw a bigger picture: the legacy of poor urban planning that had turned a thriving African American enclave into a destitute landscape pocked by industry. And now, gentrification and mounting tensions.
He quit his job, bought a camera and became a fixture at Alliance.
Six years later, "Dogtown Redemption," the documentary he created with co-director and cinematographer Chihiro Wimbush, is in the hands of judges who will announce this week whether it wins a coveted slot in the Sundance Film Festival.
The duo hopes to spur discussion with an online interactive map on which residents and business owners can track recyclers' routes and upload their own stories and opinions.
"It's film as a way to build community," said Soltani, 47. "There are all these people living at different levels here — sort of like a shattered mirror."
Even before the film's release, the long act of making it would prove transformative — for subjects and filmmakers: Lives lost. Recovery. Despair. And most of all, deep, abiding human bonds.
"I love Amir," said Hayok Kay, 59, a South Korean-born former punk rock drummer whose mental health demons have kept her on the streets for decades. "Because he's Amir."
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Soltani studied social and intellectual history at Tufts and Harvard universities, became a human rights activist and worked as a journalist before landing a Bay Area job here as Middle East editor for New America Media.
Around the corner from his new home was Alliance, which opened in 1978 — after redevelopment made its mark.
Freeways that promised connection to San Francisco had surrounded and isolated West Oakland. The depot at the western terminus of the First Transcontinental Railroad, which had brought in a flow of Southern job-seekers and cash-flush black porters, was closed.
A vibrant blues music scene died out, along with black-owned businesses that had offered a path to the middle class.
Alliance, in the neighborhood known as Dogtown, was a stage on which enduring consequences played out. Soltani settled in to watch and listen.
In mid-2008, he was joined by Wimbush, who, born to a Japanese mother and white father raised in Kenya, shared Soltani's outsider perspective of urban America.
Where many saw dank and sticky chaos, the pair found the underside of the green economy and a subculture of enterprise, where recyclers closely guarded routes built on long-cultivated relationships.
On a recent day, Roslin Brister-Sanders, 56, showed off a heavy ring of keys around her neck that grant access to garages and gates along the two-mile route she has traced with her cart for more than a decade — first with her husband, and then alone, after he landed in jail and died under mysterious circumstances.
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