NEW YORK -- In any other context, it's a mundane act. Yet when a real estate agent walks through a vacant house to end the PBS documentary Flag Wars, it seems sinister. The film about blacks and gays fighting over the future of a neighbourhood in Columbus, Ohio, opens the 16th season of the PBS series, P.O.V. tonight at 10 p.m.
The title refers to the flags filmmaker Linda Goode Bryant spotted when visiting her father in the working-class black neighbourhood known as Olde Towne East in Columbus. She naively thought it had something to do with a flower show.
Instead, the rainbow colours fluttering outside homes owned by gay men and African flags on other houses symbolized a conflict tearing the community apart.
Gay men seeking an urban enclave were buying and renovating Victorian homes in Olde Towne East. They felt they were improving a neighbourhood down on its luck, but instead antagonized black families who had been there for years.
Bryant felt it was an interesting story and spent four years filming it with Laura Poitras.
"I personally entered with the assumption that because both groups had a shared history of oppression in this society, that would create an immediate kind of bond between them," said Bryant, who is black.
The fact that it didn't "was really disheartening to me," she said.
Poitras, a white lesbian who recently moved into a Harlem home with a partner, brought a different perspective.
"My expectation wasn't that it would create common ground," she said. "My expectation was that the status of the gay community and the status of being marginalized would create blinders to the residents who lived there.
"It's human nature that big groups tend to look out for their own interests," she said.
Two personalities stand out in the film. One is Shango Baba Olugbala, a soft-spoken, longtime resident taken to city court by new neighbours who objected to a wood-carved sign on his home. Another is Linda Mitchell, a dying alcoholic who was living in squalor, but nonplussed by newcomers who constantly complained to authorities about her code violations.
In Olugbala's case, there's a sense his new neighbours don't understand anything about him, or even want to. Mitchell is invisible; she's simply an annoyance standing in the way of potential new homeowners.
The filmmakers said they went in with an open mind, wanting to tell all sides of the story fairly. Yet the new residents are clearly portrayed as villains.
That's what makes the final scene -- a real estate agent casing Mitchell's house after she dies -- so potent. It feels like a vulture picking over a warm body.
"If you lived in a neighbourhood and saw Linda Mitchell living in a rundown house that she couldn't afford, maybe you could say we're bettering the neighbourhood," Poitras said. "When you spend time, as you do in the film, you learn about her passion for the house and her history and her struggle to hang on to the house, it's a lot harder to see yourself in that light."
The gays moving in are clearly wealthier than longtime residents. But they're still minorities not fully embraced by society; Bryant emphasizes that point by including a scene in which a right-wing minister rails against legislation designed to protect gays from attack.
"I've heard it countless times -- victims are the worst victimizers," she said. "I don't understand that about human behaviour. I'm hoping at some point that's a conversation that is engaged as a result of this film."
Their film is the first of five productions planned by P.O.V. this year that are financed by public broadcasting's Diverse Voices Projects.
IF YOU WATCH
What: Flag Wars, a documentary in P.O.V. series
When: Tonight, 10 p.m.
Where: PBS
