The Last Black Man in San Francisco(2019)
dir. Joe Talbot
A man tries to move back into a family house.
Where to watch: Free: The Roku Channel, Fandango At Home (ads), YouTube Free, Plex (ads), Xumo Play, Kanopy (library card), Tubi (page showed leaving in about 19 days); rent $2.99-3.99 (JustWatch US, updated 2026-08-12). Verify.Letterboxd ↗
Jimmie Fails wants his grandfather's Victorian house back, the one in the Fillmore that his family lost when the neighborhood changed. The house is now owned by white people who do not live in it. With his friend Mont, a playwright, he starts to move in. A tender, strange film about a city that is erasing the people who made it.
Why it’s here
The film makes gentrification feel like grief and not like a statistic. What's punk is how it turns one house into a stage for the whole displacement story, and how Jimmie and Mont refuse to leave quietly. What's pedagogical is the way it gives students a way to talk about who gets to say a place is theirs. Pairs with The Color of Law, Just Action and Evicted (suggested 10-27). Note: the film is stylized and dreamlike and some critics say it is vague about how the family lost the house.
Where This Film Lives
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