About the Film

The southeast side is an overlooked, negatively stigmatized neighborhood of Chicago. This is a story about how beautiful and flourishing it once was, and how that beauty was taken away due to deindustrialization and overall disinvestment.

How does a community that once competed with downtown Chicago in stature and presence become so damaged?

SOUTHEAST: a city within a city will unfold this story, showcasing the rise and demise of this empire of a place.

We will explore the anthropology of the area, learning how the various cultures and ethnicities bonded, clashed, and assimilated throughout time, and how this history played an effect on the relationships of those peoples moving forward. We dive into the Vietnam War and government politics. We learn about street gang evolution and, of course, we will uncover the story of the steel mills.

Our aim is for this documentary to address the misguided interpretation of the southeast side. This community was–and is–a place filled with beauty, diversity and culture. Once the number one steel producing neighborhood in the world, the southeast side has suffered blow after blow following the closing of the mills, from an increase in crime, to white flight, to a higher cancer rate than most zip codes of the city combined.

What we currently see in news, museums and film about the neighborhood is either completely negative or told primarily from a White perspective. So our aim is to bring in the many cultures that make the southeast side so colorful – a true melting pot of Native, Latinx, Black, and European descent, and to tell a story that is full and inclusive.

And rather than focusing on the effects of a high crime and violence rate in the area, we want to uncover what the causes were–what led the people of the neighborhood to do the things that they do–by discovering how the neighborhood’s past affects its present.

Screening 2025.