Versoul looked to artists and activists to tell the story of the Tenderloin in her short documentary. (Joshua Miller)
In 2022, hip-hop artist Versoul temporarily stepped away from the microphone and turned on a camera to capture her grandmother’s story while her grandma was around to tell it herself.
Her grandmother Sachiko Higa Rosa Roverso immigrated from Peru to San Francisco in the early 1970s. A single mother of two sons, she lived humbly in her 200-square-foot Mission District apartment until she passed away at 82 years old, not long after Versoul recorded her story. Throughout her life, Grandmother Sachiko felt the impacts of imperialism, war and anti-Japanese racism. The lessons she taught her granddaughter — that treating people well costs nothing and has lasting positive reverberations — became Versoul’s lens as a filmmaker.
When friend and fellow hip-hop artist Dimebag Dizzy informed Versoul about the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Creative Corps Initiative, which funds social justice-related projects, Versoul knew exactly what story to tell. She pitched a documentary about artists whose work and lived experiences reframe a maligned and misunderstood neighborhood, San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, a home base for working class and immigrant families like Versoul’s own. That’s how Versoul became the director of the 30-minute short film This Is My Story: Tenderloin.
“I just want this documentary to inspire others to look at themselves and their communities, and to also treat the Tenderloin with more compassion and respect,” says the filmmaker, whose real name is Christiana Roverso.
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Versoul debuted This Is My Story: Tenderloin on Sept. 12 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in SoMa. Up next, the film screens on Nov. 19 at the Chabot Theater in Castro Valley. It features Ilyich Sato, a.k.a. Equipto, the tenured San Francisco hip-hop artist and activist of Solidarity Records. Musicians Koko G, Agent Striknine, Han!f and Roderick Brown round out the lineup.
The documentary showcases some of those young artists working out of Larkin Street Youth Services. Versoul relished the intergenerational exchange with her grandmother, and wanted to bring that approach to the documentary, captured in collaboration with her cinematographer and editor Luis Montoya.
Han!f in ‘This Is My Story: Tenderloin.’ (Versoul)
The Tenderloin is a local and national lightning rod in conversations around homelessness, drug abuse, mental health and police brutality. But Versoul wanted to “refocus the lens on the Tenderloin to a lens of beauty in the struggle, and not just the struggle.”
Despite the negative attention, there are “beautiful souls” there, she says. The way the film highlights its artists prompts viewers to reject voyeuristic trauma tourism, and asks them to reflect on the larger societal forces behind the dehumanizing conditions.
“The lack of recognizing the system is flawed is the reason the TL is the community it is. The biggest point of this documentary … is for it to reach the people that don’t know that,” Versoul says, “to give people the opportunity to experience the Tenderloin in a way that they probably wouldn’t if they walk down the street.”
Rapper and activist Equipto in ‘This Is My Story: Tenderloin.’ (Versoul )
As Versoul better understood her grandmother’s story, embracing one’s agency and seeking out one another’s humanity became foundational to her art, first through music and now through this This Is My Story: Tenderloin. Versoul intends to collect the documentary’s musicians in songs together, too.
“We can’t sit and wait to be discovered by somebody who can come and ‘save us.’ It doesn’t work like that,” she says. “That’s what ‘the revolution starts at home’ means.”
Though she faced self-doubt about helming This Is My Story: Tenderloin, before filming started, Versoul got an unexpected affirmation. She was awarded the Creative Corps grant to direct the documentary on her grandmother Sachiko’s birthday, the first after her passing.
“If that isn’t a sign that I am meant to be doing this work, a sign from my grandmother in heaven proud of me, then I don’t know what it is,” Versoul says. “In a way, it was her helping me out, because as an independent artist, I have been struggling.”
