The winner of a Special Jury award for directing at SXSW 2020, Celine Held and Logan George’s “Topside” tells the story of a five-year-old girl (Zhaila Farmer) and her mother (Held) who live underneath the streets of New York City in abandoned subway tunnels. A new trailer for the Venice International Film Festival title sees Nikki and Little forced to flee to “the topside,” which is what they call above ground.
Chaos awaits them. They struggle to find a place to sleep, and Nikki, who is called a “junkie,” risks losing custody of Little. “I want to go home,” Little begs.
When we asked Held what drew her to the story, she revealed, “In 2009, I was working in New York for Jumpstart AmeriCorps in a kindergarten class with mostly low-income students. A few months into my job there, a child was removed from my class by Child Protective Services. We found out later that his mom had been filling out job applications and marking she had a dependent, but had no permanent place to live — which is illegal in New York. His mom came at the end of the day to pick him up, oblivious to him having been taken away, and was inconsolable,” she recalled.
Held explained, “I started reading a lot about the foster care system after this incident, and the sometimes inconsistent rules that affect low-income families more than anyone else. There are currently about 22,000 children who are homeless right now in New York City and living in supportive housing or homeless shelters — a huge number that I had no idea existed. I was also reading ‘The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City’ by Jennifer Toth at the time, and came across a particularly striking line. When the author asked a tunnel dweller if there were children who lived down there, he replied no. After a moment, he added, ‘We have adults as young as five.’”
The filmmaker emphasized, “That line has stuck with me — it was the clearest way to describe who the children were in this school, almost all living lives below the poverty line — all these five-year old adults forced to grow up too fast. I wanted to find a cinematic way to tell that story.”
“Topside” marks Held and George’s feature directorial debut. They also penned its script. The drama hits select theaters and On Demand March 25.
