Every major city in the world has a “Scarborough” – they just don’t see it as a source of great storytelling.

SCARBOROUGH is about the intersecting lives of several low-income families in a working-class community. Many of these families could generously be described as “broken homes”, even if some of them call a cheap motel room “home’. The apex of their intersecting stories is a community literacy centre where children who have been displaced from school for one reason or another can come and learn.

It’s here that young Bing, Sylvie, and Laura become fast friends. Their backgrounds could not be any less similar, and yet all three find themselves dropped into the same place because of the hand fate dealt their families.

Such dissimilarities don’t matter to these children. They have yet to learn about exclusion when it comes to the children that offer their friendships. The caring they feel for one another is greater than any cynicism or gatekeeping, and it’s even enough to carry them through the most tragic of circumstances.

SCARBOROUGH is a film that wants to make us look at the people we choose not to look at. They stand behind counters in convenience stores and service us in salons. They shiver in bus shelters as we drive by and endure our ill-informed commentary. It wants us to get over our first world problems for just a second and consider the people who are making do where we could never.

What’s more, SCARBOROUGH wants us to be empathetic. It doesn’t want to spark conversation so much as it wants us to look and listen; to see the people we usually choose to ignore and to listen to the daily challenges they face. More than anything, it wants us to empathize with them – even if (sometimes especially if) they seem undeserving of our empathy.

Every major city in the world has a “Scarborough”. It’s the corner of the city where so many walks of life intersect. It’s the part of town that the rest of the city looks down on – the part of the city that becomes an adjective. It’s the place some people wish would just “go away”, and the place that becomes the butt of far too many jokes.

And yet the people who live in Scarborough are no less hard-working, and no less human than the rest of us. They aren’t looking to see themselves in films, not looking to have books written about the hardships of their lives – they are only looking to get by.

It’s the sad contradiction at the centre of SCARBOROUGH: that while it absolutely sees and acknowledges the people of the world’s Scarboroughs, at the end of the day they will be too busy and stressed to make very much of the beautiful gesture.