A closer look at Cardiff: Living on the Streets

Increasingly I’m meeting more people on the streets suffering from mental health conditions– it’s really worrying

BAFTA-nominated filmmaker Chris Rushton talks about the making of ‘Cardiff: Living on the Streets’ which was filmed with colleague Angharad Arnold over six months in the capital. Chris says a growing issue amongst the homeless they met on the streets is mental health.

We decided to focus on the plight of homeless people in Cardiff as the number of rough sleepers had doubled in the last two years. I’ve been filming with homeless communities since 2011, but what we discovered on the streets of Cardiff still shocked me.

Angharad and I wanted to show the reality of the problems faced by those who’ve live on the streets for a long period of time. We focused on filming with some of the hardest to reach homeless people, the rough sleepers and long term homeless.

You have to remember these people are the tip of the homeless iceberg and also the hardest to help. These are people who have fallen through the net and have often disengaged with society. It’s shocked me that more and more of them seem to be suffering from mental health problems and also drug misuse, which is a far bigger problem than people think amongst street homeless people.

Increasingly I am meeting more people who are on the streets suffering from conditions such as paranoid schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress syndrome and as a result are self-medicating with drugs like heroin and a new street drug called spice. From what I have seen addiction to these drugs is on the increase, it’s really worrying because it is one the reasons people become trapped in street homelessness.

The way Angharad and I approach contributors is crucial to ensuring they are comfortable to speak on camera. I believe strongly that everyone has the right to tell their story and indeed, if we do not hear the voices of some the most disenfranchised in society, their plight can all too easily be forgotten. We put vast amounts of our time into these projects and become embedded in the world of homeless people and the professionals who them, who in turn help and advise us. This is the only way to build trust and enable people to understand what kind of documentary we are making so that they can decide for themselves if they want to contribute. All the people in our films are to some extent vulnerable and we have to consider what aspects of their story they tell very carefully.

This is not a job you leave when you stop filming. You can’t see the human suffering we have and just switch off so the biggest difficulty I think of this kind of filming is psychological. I do end up thinking a lot about the homeless people we’d met over the last six months, who are out in the cold struggling with deep rooted problems. You have process it, not try to forget about it.

Cardiff: Living on the Streets starts tomorrow at 10.40pm, BBC One Wales