Local artist Sequoyah Faulk today released an 18-minute documentary called “Humboldt is Home,” which offers an up-close portrait of the county’s ongoing homelessness crisis.

The short film, which features original music produced by Faulk, was financed by a Regional Early Action Planning (REAP) grant from the California Department of Housing and Community Development, administered by the Humboldt County Association of Governments (HCAOG). 

In a phone interview Wednesday afternoon, Faulk said he hopes the project will let the voices of local people experiencing homelessness be heard so that they can be seen as human beings.

“We all want to see this situation be alleviated,” he said, noting that homelessness is a problem up and down the West Coast. “It’s extremely complicated. Hopefully we can start taking strides toward something helpful.”

At the start of the pandemic, Faulk’s dad, retired Humboldt State University political science professor Daniel Faulk, started building tiny houses, which he hoped to give to local homeless people.

“Turned out that finding a place to put them was a bit of a challenge,” Faulk said. He got involved with his dad’s effort and worked with Eureka City Councilmember Leslie Castellano to find locations for the tiny homes. Eventually they placed a couple at the St. Vincent De Paul site in Eureka.

Faulk started getting more involved in working on local homelessness issues and soon heard about the grant opportunity through the state-funded REAP initiative. The brief said organizers were seeking artists to create multimedia projects to raise awareness about the housing situation in Humboldt. 

Faulk, who started making videos as a kid, using two VCRs to edit footage of him and his friends on their bikes, thought he’d be a good candidate. 

“I felt pretty confident that I could pull something off within the parameters,” he said. “I liked that it was [defined as] an art project, so it didn’t have to be too rigid.”

The film features interviews with a handful of county residents describing their struggles to find and keep housing. In one interview, Manila resident Gwendoline Egger talks about her pending eviction from an unsanctioned encampment that law enforcement cleared out last year. 

“I got a four-year-old grandson that I’ve got guardianship of, I take care of, and nowhere to go,” Egger says in the film. She was living in an RV parked at a property on Stamps Lane, but when the county moved to clear out the property she couldn’t find anywhere else to take the vehicle, since local RV parks don’t accept older rigs.

“So I have no idea what I’m gonna do,” Egger says. “That’s [the] bottom line.”

Other locals experiencing homelessness — or on the verge of it — describe their efforts to get by from day to day. 

“Most of us, I’ll say, try to do our best not to become a problem for the people of the city that want to access all these public places where we end up … ,” California native Ami Mour says in the film. “There just aren’t as many choices as people think there might be.”

Faulk also owns and operates a small recording studio, called Shady Manila Records, and as part of the project he enlisted some musician acquaintances, including a pair of rappers who have experienced homelessness. 

In the finished film, embedded above, each of those artists — Gage Anderson, aka AlexanderTheGreatest, and Francis Verges — contributes a verse to the song that bookends the documentary. Faulk said he invited them to share their own experiences through the lyrics.

The song’s chorus was written and sung by local artist Zera Starchild.

“When I said I’m going to produce this song and I’d like you to sing chorus, she got back to me like a day later with the chorus [completed],” Faulk said.

The title of the documentary is taken from the chorus she created.