I darted across the street and up the block last Tuesday morning, where a crowd was gathered on the sidewalk outside the Citywide & Community Focus Center. This is an outpatient mental health clinic run by the San Francisco General Hospital/UCSF Department of Psychiatry. And the folks on the sidewalk - mental health professionals, clients, neighborhood stalwarts and friends - were waiting for psychiatric social worker/filmmakerPhillip Cha's 30-minute film, "Unheard Voices," which he called the "1st annual digital shorts film festival."
In the movie, seven clients of the center tell fragments of their stories, each in a separate segment. Most of them were in the crowded room where the film was shown, and stuck around to answer questions afterward.
The segment "My Bird's Nest" involved Sixth Street residentRobert Shockney, a musician and photographer of his environs. Most movingly, he talks (and sings) about a bird's nest on a ledge outside his window. Looking down into it, we see eggs and straw and some natural material, but also plastic forks, and a coffee cup lid and bottle caps. In the background is a music stand, on the shelf of which are aligned bottles of medications.
"We adapt," says Shockney, likening the birds' employment of materials to his own style of living in an SRO. On the screen flash images of pictures he has taken: the "defenestration" hotel at the corner of Sixth and Howard; a package of ramen.
When in a summing-up section at the end of the seven segments Cha asks Shockney to comment on his section, the singer-photographer is in tears, overwhelmed, he says, because "I was able to articulate what I wanted to say, that a man could survive anything, no matter what kind of squalor or dysfunction he's put into."
