Documentary Calls Attention to Renters' Plight

There's a new and

compelling documentary that exposes the life of tenants in the Toronto area. The film, "The Thousandth Tower: Stories From Inside a Toronto Suburban Highrise," provides a powerful look at the neglect of the Canadian city's suburbs and those who live there.

The web-based film profiles six residents in the run-down neighborhood of Rexdale who are living in two of the area's towers.

Part of a multimedia, multiyear project called "Highrise," the socially-conscious effort is being billed as a local-yet-global initiative in which filmmakers travel to "10 towers in 10 suburbs in 10 of the world's unlikely growing cities." Also called "The Towers in the World, the World in the Towers," this international collaborative project will take the filmmakers to Bogota, Miami, Beirut, Frankfurt, Marseilles, Dongtan, Bangalore, Tashkent and Nairobi -- cities that they've discovered are experiencing a similar situation in "vertical sprawl," both upward and outward.