Sidewalk Entrepreneurs

It's easy to overlook the people who pedal their wares in the streets. This film takes an in-depth look at those street vendors in Mexico City. It's not just about there ingenuity, passion, and the will to survive in a sprawling metropolis. It's about adapting to your surroundings and the political powers that be.

This documentary explores the raw reality of Mexico City streets and they habitants witch many have to work on their streets, where at the end, public space is illegally privatized by a corrupted network. I found it very real, brave and inspiring. Thanks for bringing us this visual material into our homes :)

Sidewalk Entrepreneurs offers a fresh look at life in Mexico City, where more than half of workers make their living on the streets. Featuring interviews with a wide cast of street vendors (from performance artists to DIY merchants in the skateboarding community), the film's subjects reflect the warmth, spirit and grind of the city that they live in. Elliot manages to capture raw, personal accounts of the bustling, uniquely chaotic informal economy that sustains CDMX. Really refreshing to see a positive portrayal of life in Mexico for people in the States, when so much of what we see is negative sensationalism. Highly recommend!

I've been to Mexico City quite a few times. Street vendors, performers, and hustlers are a huge part of the appeal of Mexico City for me, and one can't help but wonder about the lives of those people that make the city so vibrant. So, when I watched Sidewalk Entrepreneurs at a local film festival, it king of froze me in my tracks. Several of the characters that told their stories of life in the streets of Mexico City were people that I recall seeing in my travels there. The film answered so many questions for me about these characters' personalities, motivations, challenges, and successes. Next time I travel to Mexico City, I'll see it in a whole new light shed by this cleverly crafted film.

I don't know if it's a funding issue, but it seems like independent documentaries are almost singularly focused on scaring people in some way or another. Sidewalk Entrepreneurs is about people making their money on the streets of Mexico City, and so could easily have fallen into that cliche as well. It doesn't however, and instead sets course to the opposite horizon. This is a story about human beings making a living in ways that are creative, difficult, and, in some ways enviable. It isn't that there isn't danger, and there is definitely suspense, but this is a movie about decency, hard work, and ingenuity. The people in this film are the same people, sitting on street corners trying to make a living, that you might try to avoid eye contact with. It won't make you feel guilty about doing so, instead it will make you realize that you are missing an opportunity to connect with some of your more interesting brothers and sisters on the planet. I love this film, and I hope to see more from this creator.