The residents struggling with homelessness and housing affordability in San Francisco, one of the richest cities in one of the world’s wealthiest nations, are proving that they’re overcoming their circumstances to be a solid community. Their plight is highlighted in the new award-winning documentary, ‘Home Is a Hotel.’

The feature is set to premiere in Austin at the Austin Film Festival on Sunday, October 29. The project will also be featured in the San Diego Asian Film Festival on November 8, and premiere in Los Angeles on November 19 at the NewFilmmakers Los Angeles DocuSlate. In honor of the project’s upcoming screenings, Film Factual is exclusively premiering the feature’s poster.

‘Home Is a Hotel’s upcoming festival screenings come after it won the Audience Award – Documentary Feature and McBaine Bay Area Award – Documentary Feature Golden Gate Awards at the San Francisco International Film Festival in April. The project then screened at the Rhode Island International Film Festival in August.

‘Home Is a Hotel’ chronicles how across America, cities are struggling with homelessness and housing affordability. The decades old solution – living in cramped Single Room Occupancy (SRO) units – greatly impacts the lives of those who live in them.

The movie showcases San Francisco’s SRO housing through intimate portraits of their residents shot over five years. The 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.

The film tells 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. As they all contend with their struggles, they try to improve their lives within the four walls of rentals as tiny as 80 square feet.

Kevin Duncan Wong directed and produced ‘Home Is a Hotel.’ After a stint in visual effects powerhouse company ILM, he ventured out into the world of independent filmmaking. In 2005, while attending 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 movies have played at festivals across the country including Bigy Sky, SFFilm and Cinequest, and have also been featured on PBS and in The Washington Post.

Wong’s narrative films include ‘Forgetting,’ an adaptation of an episode of WNYC’s Radiolab, and ‘Jus Soli,’ a sci-fi thriller about immigration and data privacy that stars Lynn Chen.  He was a 2022 Sundance Humanities Sustainability Fellow and SFFilm Filmhouse resident for ‘Home is a Hotel.’ He was also a BAVC Media Maker fellow in 2016, and his feature screenplay ‘Nellie’ was a second round selection in the 2013 Sundance Screenwriters Lab.

‘Home Is a Hotel’s filmmaking team also includes co-director-producer Kar Yin Tham and co-director-producer Todd Sills. They were also joined by 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 cameraman Martin Rossetti.

For more information on ‘Home Is a Hotel,’ visit its official website.