Imagine getting a notice you have to move out in three days. In many parts of the United States, landlords can evict tenants with as little as three days notice, for any reason whatsoever. 3 Day Eviction is based on a true story and follows Bene, an apartment manager who is ordered by the new owners of his building to evict all his tenants before a new statewide rent control law kicks in. A people pleaser at heart, he struggles with the task and tries to make everyone happy; but in doing so ultimately leads to his complete alienation and disenfranchisement.

Director’s Statement

While the pandemic we’re going through right now is dominating the news cycle, lower income communities have had to face a man-made epidemic of their own for years: Gentrification. With housing prices skyrocketing around the country, landlords have been evicting poorer tenants with little to no notice, often with trumped up reasons. While we wanted to draw attention to this plight, we also wanted to offer a nuanced perspective of the issue through someone stuck in the middle – an apartment manager beholden to both the owners and the tenants. In doing so, we wanted to show all parties as being victims of a system rooted in exploitation: everyone from the tenants to the managers and to a lesser extent the new owners (pushed by their investors to turn a profit ASAP) is under pressure. Even well meaning rent control laws designed to prevent the very evictions depicted in the film cause unintended consequences as the new owners hasten the departure of old tenants before the new laws get codified. Ultimately, the portrayal of this sad lose-lose, no-compromise situation was the genesis of this project and a theme I wanted to convey in my first ever docudrama. Telling a delicately woven social justice story like this was definitely a creative and stylistic challenge for a guy who usually does action films!