Liz Lambert’s new movie is a case study in why property developers shouldn’t make documentaries about gentrification. The Austin-based hotelier’s debut film, released in March, attempts to give viewers a lens into the struggles faced by business people seeking to profit off making this city hip. On that front—and on very few others—it succeeds. The film inadvertently portrays Lambert as insensitive and voyeuristic, as she dehumanizes the film’s subjects. She presents an apolitical version of “Keep Austin Weird,” one that imagines poor, homeless Austinities as “eccentrics” of the past who don’t fit into a gleaming modern city.
Austinites are probably familiar with Lambert’s name—Lambert is well known for designing stunning and high-end hotels and restaurants in the capital city and elsewhere in the state. For more than 20 years, she hosted South By San José, a sort of locals-only version of the sprawling downtown festival. Now, she’s added director and producer with Through the Plexi-Glass: The Last Days of the San José, released at the virtual SXSW this year. It chronicles the early days of her first project, the bungalow-style, upscale boutique hotel on South Congress Avenue. The film covers the three years in the late 1990s after Lambert bought the original property, then the run-down San José Motel, which she eventually renovated and reopened in its current form.
While it wasn’t spliced together until recently, Lambert shot the movie between 1995 and 1998, during which she recorded interactions with people who hung around South Congress and families who were living at the motel on the verge of homelessness. Lambert evicts them and then has the audacity to stick a camera in their faces and ask them where they’ll go next. Several say they have no idea.
