Leticia Chavez’s day begins in the lobby of Hedrick Hall, where she works her way up seven floors, emptying the garbage cans of each lounge and laundry room before the crack of dawn, as students sleep soundly in their bunks.
Chavez has been working as a UCLA housekeeper for five years, with duties ranging from changing the garbage bags and cleaning the bathrooms of Hedrick Hall to hauling carts piled with college students’ trash into the loading docks for recycling.
“It’s a hard job,” Chavez said. “It’s hard because when you come to work you always see something different to clean.”
It is the hard work of Chavez and the thousands of university janitors across the country that keep campuses functioning and habitable for students all around. With students coming and going during their busy lives, a layer of ignorance grows because they take their freshly cleaned bathrooms and pristinely vacuumed carpets for granted.
The documentary “The Philosopher Kings” wishes to erase some of that ignorance with an in-depth focus into the lives of university janitors, and showcases the rich breadth of knowledge of those who mop and sweep in silence.
The film will be having its Los Angeles showings at the Downtown Independent Theater from Friday to Thursday with the cast and filmmakers in attendance on opening night.
“It’s too bad that we have this tendency to overlook people if they don’t have a big vocabulary or if they don’t have a specific profession or occupation,” said Patrick Shen, director of the film. “It’s just kind of how the world operates and that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to make this film.”
Shen set out to make a film that revealed the humanity of the lives of people who are often marginalized in society. With the beauteous backdrops of some of the most prestigious colleges in the country, Shen depicts those who keep up those campus aesthetics with authenticity and engaging stories. The narratives of the film feature eight janitors who go beyond mopping and dusting. For instance, one of the janitors, Luis Cardenas, went back to work at the California Institute of Technology only 10 months after being hit by a drunk driver, losing his right arm and being left in a coma for two weeks.
“At the beginning, it was difficult to adjust to doing things with one arm,” Cardenas said. “However, when I returned to work, there were a number of individuals who made the effort to make sure I felt comfortable … and that I had what I needed in order to perform my custodial responsibilities.”
Another one of the narratives features Josue Lajeunesse, a janitor at Princeton University who also works at night as a taxicab driver to support his family and children and to fund a clean water project in his home village of Lasource, Haiti. Due to his around-the-clock jobs, Lajeunesse responded through e-mail message about the difficulties of working in America as opposed to working in Haiti.
“A job is a job. It doesn’t matter how good of a job I had when I was in Haiti. When you move somewhere else, you are going to have to start over. It was difficult. In Haiti I did work hard, but not how I work here, which is basically 24/7,” Lajeunesse said.
Because of the recent earthquake in Haiti, Lajeunesse is even more compelled to work, saying he has to fight and work hard to make things better.
The theme of perseverance weaves through each narrative, such as in the case of Jim Evener, a janitor at Cornell University and a Vietnam veteran who was shot in the back and had to drag himself through the jungle for days using his arms. Beneath his pleasant demeanor is the memory of a multitude of hardships, yet he remains optimistic about his occupation, saying in the film, “If you’re miserable every day, you’re doing something wrong.”
Evener and others in the film erase the notion of the misery of cleaning as work. Corby Baker, a janitor at the Cornish College of the Arts relishes the art school setting of his work, which builds inspiration for his own creativity. Melinda Augustus, a janitor at the Florida Museum of Natural History, finds beauty in the butterflies that flutter in the museum’s wildflower and butterfly garden at the University of Florida.
There is a simple notion that these janitors relish their respective places of work.
“I feel rewarded each time someone says, “˜Thank you for a job well done,'” Cardenas said.
In a scene in the film, Cardenas is shown emptying a garbage can with one arm while a woman has her head down in total obliviousness. The film attempts to lift those heads and just simply acknowledge the person emptying the garbage can.
“The main message of the film is that we want people to see other people,” Shen said. “We just wanted people to see the value of other people and that was really sort of the bottom line.”