Wednesday, January 7, 2026 at 8:00 PM to 10:30 PM
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
POOR Magazine, in partnership with Green Diamond Projects, presents a screening of the documentary CRUSHING WHEELCHAIRS. ∆ CRUSHING WHEELCHAIRS is a unique film about homelessness in modern America. The project features a cast and crew of currently and/or formerly unhoused residents of the San Francisco Bay Area who brought their real-life struggles and stories to the screen. The story traces the descent of a group of people into homelessness; a Black woman vet struggling to preserve her home amidst rising gentrification, a poor mother in an abusive relationship struggling to raise and protect her son, an incarcerated mother who lost her kids to the state and is plagued by memories of her family’s dissolution, a homeless man who survives on collecting aluminum cans, and an immigrant laborer facing eviction. The character’s lives intersect at a houseless encampment community in Oakland where the city deploys giant machines and police terror to sweep away their belongings, tents, wheelchairs and bodies. Ultimately, the story traverses past and present, life and death, and explores the triumphs of the human spirit that can never be crushed. The project is a production of POOR Magazine in partnership with Green Diamond Projects and is an adaptation of a play written by formerly unhoused poverty scholar, author and activist “Tiny” Lisa Gray-Garcia, co-founder of POOR Magazine – an Oakland-based media arts non-profit led by poor, Black and Indigenous visionaries. CRUSHING WHEELCHAIRS is a boundary breaking film that invites audiences to experience the realities of poverty and homelessness directly from those who struggle against it everyday but who rarely (if ever) are the ones in front of or behind the camera.