“THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO” 2019 | 2h01’ [US] | GENTRIFICATION Scrngs

## Ciclo TURISTIFICAÇÃO | GENTRIFICAÇÃO

[OVERTOURISM | GENTRIFICATION Cinema Screenings]
Curadoria de Alexandre Braga

“THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO” 2019 | M/14 | 2h01’ [US]
De Joe Talbot
Sábado Dia 27/06 às 19h30 [Saturday 06/27 at 7:30pm]
Um jovem afro-americano tenta recuperar a casa vitoriana que acredita ter pertencido à sua família em São Francisco. Entre sonho e realidade, o filme torna-se uma elegia sobre pertença, memória e deslocamento urbano.

A young Black man attempts to reclaim a Victorian house he believes belonged to his family in San Francisco. Between dream and reality, the film becomes an elegy about belonging, memory, and urban displacement.

Spoken in English | Subtitled in Portuguese

IMDB
Trailer

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https://prosacultural.org/cinema/turisgentri

‍In recent years, Lisbon has become one of the most desired cities in Europe. Yet this transformation — often celebrated as a sign of modernity, revitalization, or economic success — has also brought with it an increasingly visible tension: the growing difficulty of remaining. Between unaffordable rents, historic neighborhoods turned into temporary accommodation zones, traditional commerce replaced by an internationalized aesthetic, and communities slowly displaced toward the outskirts, a strange feeling begins to emerge — the sense that certain cities are ceasing to exist as lived places and are instead becoming consumable images.

This phenomenon does not belong to Lisbon alone. It echoes through Porto, the Algarve, coastal cities, rural areas transformed into tourist destinations, and even small territories beginning to reorganize themselves around an economy of constant circulation. Overtourism and gentrification do not merely alter buildings or prices: they reshape rhythms of life, human relationships, collective memory, and forms of belonging. When a neighborhood loses its inhabitants, its cafés, its accents, and its small everyday gestures, it also loses something invisible yet essential — the human density that transforms a space into a community.

It is precisely within this territory of friction that the two films in this cycle meet. In Bait (2019), directed by Mark Jenkin, an English fishing village becomes the site of a collision between the survival of an ancestral local culture and the arrival of a new tourist economy that turns homes into investments and territory into product. Shot on rough, grainy 16mm film, the work seems to carry within the very body of its images the erosion of a disappearing way of life.

Meanwhile, The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019), directed by Joe Talbot, follows the melancholic attempt of a young Black man to reclaim the Victorian house he believes once belonged to his family. Suspended between dream, memory, and urban displacement, the film transforms San Francisco into an almost ghostly city where the very idea of belonging appears to dissolve beneath speculation and accelerated social transformation.

Though profoundly different in language and tone, both films interrogate the same contemporary wound: the moment when a city ceases to recognize those who silently built it over time. More than films “about housing” or “about tourism,” these works explore the intimate relationship between identity and space. To inhabit has never meant merely occupying a physical location. To inhabit implies memory, repetition, affection, recognition, and continuity. It implies the existence of small daily rituals that shape human life and create invisible bonds between people and places.
In this sense, Bait and The Last Black Man in San Francisco also become films about resistance. Not necessarily heroic or revolutionary resistance, but affective resistance: the attempt to preserve fragments of human truth in a world where everything tends to be converted into circulation, valuation, and spectacle. Perhaps that is the silent question running through this cycle: what remains of a city when it is still physically intact, yet no longer capable of welcoming those who once gave it life?

(Curatorship by Alexandre Braga)

All Cinema PROSA films will be shown on an illuminated pixel (65’’ QLED screen) in a room with a maximum capacity of 24 spectators.

Come and have a glass of wine or a non-alcoholic drink in the cinema room with us!