If you love you some Tenderloin, then you’ll probably love a new documentary being readied for its premiere on Tuesday at San Francisco’s Main Library.
The movie is called “Love Me Tenderloin,” and it was shot by a French filmmaker who came to San Francisco a year ago for the first time and was promptly entranced by the city’s grittiest neighborhood. Twenty-seven-year-old Henri Quenette got to know several characters in the TL (as the locals call it) with the help of Tenderloin tour guide Del Seymour, then toted a Panasonic AC-90 digital camera around for several months documenting people’s lives.
Street denizen ‘Indian Joe,’ from the movie ‘Love Me Tenderloin’ / Photo Courtesy Henri Quenette
The result is an unflinching view through the eyes of social workers, folks struggling with drug addiction, and homeless people and other street characters including “Indian Joe,” whose face bears dark black streaks as he ambles along the sidewalks. Joe can look scary to your typical passerby, but spend some time chatting and he’s a kick …. which is the kind of insight you get from this 70-minute cinematic jaunt into a mini-world most non-residents people know little or nothing about, beyond an impression that it’s a place to avoid.
“Everything seemed pretty and wealthy everywhere else in the city to me when I first got here, but then I saw the Tenderloin and it really surprised me,” said Quenette, who earned his master’s degree in film two years ago at the New Sorbonne University in Paris and is staying in San Francisco this week for his premiere. “In France, that kind of neighborhood with poverty is usually not right in the center of town, but here it is two blocks from the Powell Street cable car station, and right near City Hall. I thought it was really interesting to see so much poverty with so much wealth all around it.”
That might sum up the view of your typically erudite tourist, but the movie shows he went deeper than that and spent real time with real people, capturing some real moments. Quenette funded the film through crowdsourcing, and got help on editing from friends and Concordia University in Montreal. He now lives in New York, but intends to shop the movie around at film festivals once it gets its first airing at the library on Tuesday — which will happen at 5:45 p.m. in the Koret Auditorium. Admission is free.
“When you walk in the Tenderloin, you realize people are really connected,” Quenette said. “They really know each other. I’ve never seen a neighborhood with so much life to it in the streets.”
