Director Kevin Duncan Wong’s documentary Home Is a Hotel immerses viewers in what it means to call a single room home in the heart of one of America’s richest cities.
The documentary will premiere in Austin at the Austin Film Festival on October 29, 2023 and will also be featured in the San Diego Asian Film Festival on November 8, 2023 and premiering in Los Angeles on November 19, 2023 at the NewFilmmakers Los Angeles DocuSlate.
Across America, cities are struggling with homelessness and housing affordability. How does one decades old solution — cramped Single Room Occupancy (SRO) units — impact the lives of those who live in them? Director Kevin Wong’s Home Is a Hotel takes you inside San Francisco’s SRO housing through intimate portraits of their residents filmed over five years. This character-driven, verité documentary immerses viewers in what it means to call a single room home in the heart of one of America’s richest cities. It’s the story of an immigrant single mom in Chinatown, a blind Latina librettist fighting harassment and eviction, a divorced couple in recovery co-parenting a six-year-old son, a graffiti artist who paints murals for the tech companies gentrifying his neighborhood, and a determined mother on a quest to find her runaway daughter — all of them trying to better their lives within the four walls of rentals as tiny as 80 square feet.
Kevin Duncan Wong is Home Is a Hotel’s director, and one of the film’s producer. After a stint in visual effects powerhouse ILM, he ventured out into the world of independent filmmaking. In 2005 while at San Francisco State University, he produced, shot and edited “A Moral Debt” a SFSU-funded documentary about the unjust treatment of Filipino veterans of WWII. His Non-Fiction films have played at festivals across the country including Bigy Sky, SFFilm and Cinequest, and been featured on PBS and in The Washington Post.
His narrative films include “Forgetting,” an adaptation of an episode of WNYC’s Radiolab, and “Jus Soli” a SciFi Thriller about immigration and data privacy starring Lynn Chen. He is a 2022 Sundance Humanities Sustainability Fellow and SFFilm Filmhouse resident for “Home is a Hotel”, was a BAVC Media Maker fellow in 2016, and his feature screenplay “Nellie” was a 2nd round selection in the 2013 Sundance Screenwriters Lab.
Home Is a Hotel’s filmmaking team also includes co-director/producer Kar Yin Tham, co-director/producer Todd Sills, editor Kristina Motwani, cinematographer Seng Chen, associate editor Susannah Smith, composer Catherine Joy, consulting producer Sasha Hauswald, associate producer Maria Mealla, and associate producer/additional camera Martin Rossetti.
Watch the festival trailer for Home Is a Hotel