The Wood Street encampment in Oakland, once Northern California’s largest homeless encampment, was demolished in 2023, displacing an estimated 300 residents.
The eviction process was protracted and followed a series of complex legal battles led by residents of the encampment, who organized as a collective to advocate for their rights. Caron Creighton, a Bay Area-based filmmaker, captured their fight as part of her feature debut Wood Street, which screens this week at the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia.
Creighton first learned of the encampment and its residents when she was working as a journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle.
“John, one of the main participants in the film, had been hosting a series of parties at Wood Street and would invite people to come,” Creighton explains. “As a journalist, I went to one of those parties and began to meet people from the community. Quickly it became clear the community wasn’t this scary place as people had described.”
When the Wood Street residents received an eviction notice in 2022, Creighton quit her job and began documenting their efforts to stop the eviction.
“I bought a nicer camera and just started going there every day,” she says.
Wood Street runs for around 100 minutes, and it is a sobering watch. The story unravels with urgency. There are no sad backstories or manipulative needle drops. Creighton places the viewer at the heart of the action, the majority of which she shot solo.
“I shot maybe 95% of it myself,” Creighton explains. “I had one camera, a Canon C70 with a shotgun mic. And then I would put one lav mic on whoever I was filming that day. Sometimes I would even just throw my phone in the mix and hit record.”
The Wood Street residents don’t shy away from Creighton’s camera, and they make for compelling characters on screen. John Janosko and LaMonté Ford, two long-term residents of Wood Street, are Creighton’s main protagonists. The pair help to organize and inspire their neighbors throughout the legal battle with the City. By the time Creighton had begun filming them, she explains, they had become accustomed to media attention.
“It wasn’t new. There was a lot of press there, and they were really struggling to maintain their community, so they wanted all of the press they could get,” Creighton says. “But I think getting them to trust me happened by showing up every day and spending time where I wasn’t filming. I might be there for eight hours, but I’m only filming for two hours. I lived close by, so I’d come back a couple of times per day.”
Creighton has been screening Wood Street across Oakland and the Bay Area.
“We just did three local screenings, and all of them were sold out, so it’s really cool that people are interested in this story,” she explains.
The film has also screened at a series of doc festivals, including the San Francisco Documentary Festival, before heading to BlackStar. After BlackStar, the film will play a range of regional U.S. fests before Creighton aims to lock in distribution.
“I’ve had distributors ask me, are there any celebrities that care about homelessness?” Creighton jokes, explaining that making the film accessible to people is far more interesting to her than some sort of contrived celebrity impact campaign.
“A lot of educational distributors work with Kanopy, which allows you to watch the film for free if you have a library card, which is amazing. For me, accessibility is really important,” Creighton says. “I know a lot of people don’t love that PBS now puts films on YouTube, but I kind of like that. I really want poor and unhoused people to be able to see the film, so that is appealing to me. I just want something accessible.”
Creighton adds with a smile, “Anywhere good that doesn’t cost me money to put it on would be great.”
Creighton has also screened the film for members of the former Wood Street community.
“We did an outdoor screening on Wood Street for the folks who are still living out there, and that was so powerful,” she says.
“The majority seem to really like the film and believe it is a great representation of their story. Homeless people in general have been subject to so much media coverage without their input. I think they appreciate the time that was put in. A lot of them actually kept asking, Where’s the second film? But I don’t have the time or capacity for that.”
The unfortunate reality of independent filmmaking in 2026, Creighton explains that despite sold-out screenings and opening a feature at multiple festivals across the country, she is now back looking for full-time jobs.
“I need to pay my rent,” she says. “I’d love to make more films, but to be honest, at this point, there is no straight career path for an indie filmmaker. You can’t live grant to grant. It’s just not doable.”
Creighton produced the film alongside Estevan Padilla. Tiffany Fisher-Love was a consulting producer alongside Kelsey Oliver, who served as the associate producer. Eavvon O’Neal edited the film alongside Creighton.
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