FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

- What is "Pilsen In Grey,"?

Briefly, Pilsen In Grey is a passion project and documentary created by six then Seniors at Benito Juarez Community Academy in Pilsen, Chicago. The goal of the documentary is, through the use of different perspectives in the Pilsen community, try to figure out the conversation that is being had about the issue of gentrification. 

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- What is gentrification?

Oxford Dictionary defines gentrification as: "the process of renovating and improving a house or district so that it conforms to middle-class taste."

In the Pilsen neighborhood, there are multitude of branches that gentrification has making its classification vague to what is happening in the Pilsen neighborhood. For the purposes of the documentary, we have our own interpretation and definition for what gentrification is:

Gentrification is the act in which a predominantly lower-class neighborhood undergoes redevelopment and renovation to suit the tastes and aesthetic of a middle-class neighborhood.

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- Why call the documentary "Pilsen In Grey,"?

The name of the documentary was our first pick for a name and we had the name made up even before pre-production officially began back in late-November of 2018. It is called Pilsen In Grey because it is reflective of two key factors that had happened as a result of the Casa Aztlan situation highlighted in the documentary. The grey in the name is reflective of the fact that the murals that surrounded Casa Aztlan were painted over in grey paint, with the grey also representing the emotion Pilsen residents were feeling as a result to the murals being painted over. 

Inadvertently, throughout the course of production for the film, we became aware of another meaning for the title: It is the fact that the situation of gentrification, not just in Pilsen but all over the world, is not a simple black and white issue (that representing either being "Gentrification," or "Anti-Gentrification") - it is an issue in grey.

We do believe there are more interpretations for the documentary title, but those are the three main meanings.

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- What was your main reason to make this documentary?

Many of us who worked on the film are from, or were from, the Pilsen neighborhood. Since all of us who worked on the film went to Benito Juarez Community Academy, regardless of whether someone is from either Little Village or Back of the Yards, everyone had their own connection and love for Pilsen.

We all had a vested interest in figuring out what exactly did the issue of gentrification looked like and go into researching this issue with an open mind instead of believe one point of view of what gentrification looked like. The main reason for making the documentary was because we wanted to educate ourselves on this issue and pass of what we learned through the people we talked to in the neighborhood and our own research to the general public and more specifically, to Pilsen residents.

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- Why Pilsen? Why not Wicker Park or Logan Square?

We understand that there are other neighborhoods in the city of Chicago that have experienced the same historical issue of gentrification and still deal with the consequences of such. We went with Pilsen because it is the community that all of us who worked on the film feel connected with the most and wanted to tell the Pilsen story.

We did look into and researched what gentrification looked like in those two communities, but to keep the film a little over an hour, we decided to only focus on Pilsen.

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- The documentary follows the 2018 Local Election for the 25th Ward Alderman, why is that?

We wanted to know what the perspective of each Aldermanic candidate was regarding this issue of gentrification and what their potential solutions towards the issue were. The 2018 election for Alderman was very consequential since Danny Solis, the then Alderman of the 25th Ward, declared he would not seek re-election. It was important for us to know what each candidate had to say as it would have consequences to how the issue of gentrification would be tackled.

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- Did your team come in with any sort of bias in the beginning of the production of the film? If so, has that changed?

Yes, we came in with this predisposition narrative of what gentrification was. We were young and impressionable and believed the simple narrative that, "Gentrification is bad, people are being thrown out of their houses, it's all the Aldermans fault, and Pilsen needs to stay Mexican."

It was eye-opening to be able to take a step back and learn about gentrification through a different lens. It's not to say that the issue of gentrification is "bad," but it is more complicated than that. People have been displaced in the Pilsen community, but the 10,300 number that people throw around has been overblown to the point people believe that 10,300 people have been displaced: again, it is more complicated than that. We learned that everything we've been told about what gentrification was and how it looked like in Pilsen. That's what made it eye-opening for many of us.

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- What equipment and resources did you use to film the documentary?

We used a Canon EOS Rebel T6 to shoot the majority of the documentary. If we did not have space in our SD cards, we simply used an iPhone to record the rest of a particular scene or interview. We did not have an official budget to spend on the film, but we've spent a total of $300 accounting for purchases of SD cards and transportation.

We had tripods available to us from our high school and used a microphone connected to an Apple Macbook Air (2014 Version) to record audio on to Garageband or we used an iPhone with the Voice Memos app to capture audio.

Believe it or not, but we used iMovie to edit the whole documentary. Music was royalty free and was accessed through the YouTube Audio Library. Some music was recorded and made for the film by the people on the team.

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