Following a community of politically motivated New York squatters
Survival Without Rent is a visceral collage of unearthed archival media showing how artists and activists transformed abandoned buildings into a radical enclave.
Survival Without Rent is a visceral collage of unearthed archival media showing how artists and activists transformed abandoned buildings into a radical enclave.
Survival Without Rent traces the history of the squatters' movement from the 1970s, when a financial crisis in New York triggered a wave of building abandonment, to the mid-1990s, when the Giuliani Administration launched an attack on lower Manhattan's squats.
The film also explores broader topics of government disinvestment, anticapitalist critique, extralegal activism, and the intersection of community arts and urban resistance movements.