The Shame of a City

The Shame of a City is a 2006 feature-length documentary, which premiered at the Philadelphia Film Festival,. Filmmaker Tigre Hill chronicles the 2003 Philadelphia mayoral race between Democrat incumbent mayor John Street and Republican challenger Sam Katz. Early polls showed Katz with a small lead in this predominantly Democratic city but twenty-seven days before the election, an FBI bug was found in the mayor’s office. The discovery at first seemed like a death knell to the Street campaign and a near certain victory for Katz. Yet this prediction was proven wrong when Street and his supporters successfully polarized the campaign by leveling accusations of instituational racial prejudice and playing on historical skepticism of the Republican-controlled federal government. As a result, Street won re-election by a sixteen-point margin.

With exclusive inside access to the Katz campaign, “The Shame of a City” traverses the bizarre final month to Election Day with the losing candidate as he tries in vain to salvage his campaign while his victor succeeds in manipulating voter sentiment in order to thwart it.

The Shame of a City is named for Lincoln Steffens’ 1904 book, The Shame of the Cities, which sought to expose the wrongdoing of public officials in cities across the United States. Considered one of the first and finest examples of muckraking journalism, the book sparked Hill’s idea to shine a similar light into the deep corners where Philly’s political cronyism and malfeasance lurk. In his book, Lincoln Steffens infamously calls Philadelphia “corrupt and contented.” One hundred years later, this documentary explodes with overwhelming evidence that not much has changed.

The Shame of a City gained widespread attention for exposing many high-ranking Street supporters as disingenuous opportunists who intentionally and falsely manipulated racial tensions and suspicion of President George W Bush's administration to get Street re-elected, despite a string of corruption indictments in his inner circle that threatened to implicate him directly.

The film won several awards (most notably “Best Feature-Length Film” at the 2006 Philadelphia Film Festival's Festival of Independents) and generated monumental amounts of press, earning Hill an interview on MSNBC, named references in five successive issues of Philadelphia magazine, and positive reviews by The Philadelphia Inquirer, among others.

"Tigre Hill’s The Shame of a City is a civic Rorschach test. A cautionary tale of the streetfight that was the 2003 Philadelphia mayoral contest, this scrappy exposé reveals how Smear-Room politics alienates voters across the political and color spectrum." Carrie Rickey, The Philadelphia Inquirer

...
Wikipedia