FIRE WITHIN
A film by Laetitia Jacquart & Corinne Sullivan
Produced by Rebecca Houzel (Petit à Petit production)
Documentary / 2025 / France
Language: English
Subtitles: English
P&A
Presskit
Official selections
COMING SOON
Synopsis
Unhoused in San Francisco, Dawn and Tony find solace with Terry and Harry who facilitate support groups at Glide Church. They challenge them to overcome the hurdles of their situations and stand up for their community. The film weaves together their intimate stories of resilience and their fight to reclaim their place in society.
Logline
Between the churches and the streets, Dawn, Tony, Miss Terry and Reverend Harry fight to forge their place in an American Society ravaged by inequalities.
“In a country where public institutions increasingly offload responsibility onto churches — and where religion shapes national identity — what does faith mean for those living in exclusion? How is “God” experienced on the margins, where survival itself becomes a daily act of resistance?
These questions led us to Glide Church in San Francisco’s Tender — loin district — a radical sanctuary and the city’s largest social center. Each day, Glide provides 2,000 meals, healthcare, housing, and support to one of North America’s largest unhoused communities.
We came to Glide not with a camera, but with time and a desire to understand. As agnostic filmmakers, we joined support groups, showed up week after week, and slowly became part of the community. Over the course of a year, we built the relationships that would shape the film. That’s when we met Dawn, Tony, Terry, and Harry. Each of them carries what Terry calls a “fire within” — a fierce determination to move forward, despite everything.
Fire Within follows four lives as they intertwine and unfold across the city. It is a film about resilience, about the fight for dignity, and about the transformative power of community in a society fractured by inequality. The film is anchored in the lived, subjective experience of its protagonists — where perception, emotion, and imagination are in constant tension with a harsh external reality.
This narrative invites the audience into the interior spaces where belief takes shape. Faith, in this world, is shifting and personal questioned, reshaped, and pulled from the church pews into the streets. “God” emerges in many forms: as comfort, as conflict, as presence. Terry’s voiceover and the intimate confessions of Tony and Dawn were crafted collaboratively to reveal their ways of seeing and believing. Their voices do not explain — they share. They make visible an interiority too often ignored.
From the beginning, we knew the camera had to move with the characters — handheld, close, responsive — capturing not just actions, but breath, tension, silence. We followed Harry as he preached on street corners, Dawn as she wrestled with rage while lifting others up, Tony in his quiet search for shelter, and Terry, whose interior monologue opens up vast philosophical and emotional terrain — about justice, existence, survival, and faith.
Set in a city that embodies the contradictions of extreme wealth and profound social exclusion, Fire Within brings homelessness, religion, and queer identity into intimate focus. As systems fail and belonging is contested, what kind of faith survives — and what does it mean to keep a fire burning on the margins?”
OFFICIAL TRAILER
SCREENER
Date
26 April 2025
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