Tiny shelter carpenter Khaleel Seivwright at centre of Hot Docs’ ‘Someone Lives Here’

Khaleel Seivwright “slept, ate, breathed” the tiny shelter project that saw homeless people take refuge in the small structures he built.

That’s according to the director of “Someone Lives Here,” a new documentary about Seivwright’s journey building the portable shelters and his uphill battle against opposition at Toronto city hall.

Seivwright created the insulated structures — which used body heat to preserve warmth — as an alternative to the city’s shelter system, where assaults had been common and COVID-19 had been spreading. The Toronto carpenter, who had once experienced homelessness himself, quit his job to take on the project full-time.

“It was his life,” filmmaker Zack Russell said in an interview.

The documentary — premiering on Saturday at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema — captures the laborious weeks Seivwright dedicated to building the structures and the emotional toll that came with opposition from officials.

“Someone Lives Here” also provides a fresh look at the grim realities of Toronto’s homelessness crisis by homing in on encampments in Toronto parks and following the fight of a man whom residents and people around the world regarded as a local hero.

Seivwright doing “something concrete” to engage with the pervasive issue of homelessness is what inspired Russell to put him at the centre of the film, the director said.

It was an optimistic perspective but one that came crashing down when the city issued an injunction against Seivwright to stop him from erecting the tiny shelters. The city sent a torrent of staff, security guards and even mounted police to clear Toronto homeless encampments in the face of resistance from residents and protestors, an effort a recent ombudsman’s report described as unacceptable.

“I … didn’t think we were making a film that was going to be as violent,” Russell said, referring to the video captured at the encampment clearings. “(When) you think of a carpenter building little life-saving shelters for people, you don’t think about … state violence.”

The city’s response to the tiny shelters and their move to have them taken out of parks “felt like a war against people,” Russell added. He noted that senior city staff described an effort to remove the camps at “wartime speed.”

The film displays the highs and lows of the experience with striking images, heartbreaking anecdotes from unhoused people, and the wit and wisdom of narrator Taka, who has experienced homelessness herself.

The insights from Taka and others who shared similar experiences made Russell realize just “how hard it is to be homeless, and how much energy and intelligence and humour and kindness there is in people who are trying to survive.”

In creating the film — a year-long process that was and continues to be unfunded — he said he also didn’t expect that so much of his time would be spent helping people make it through the night.

“I would just be making sure someone didn’t freeze to death or helping someone get medication, or these sort of smaller things that you kind of just have to do when you’re in a humanitarian crisis.”

With the documentary done and scheduled for viewings, shelters are still overflowing (and even closing down), people are still living on the street and homelessness continues to be normalized, Russell said.

“The only thing that’s actually stopped that we can say definitively is the creation of the tiny shelters.”

Russell is looking forward to having the film being seen in the city it’s about, ahead of a mayoral election.

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