They built a village beneath the streets of Manhattan. Shacks of scavenged wood, wired for electricity tapped off the city grid, furnished with salvaged couches and working stoves.

Marc Singer, a Londoner in his early twenties, had never made a film before. He moved into the tunnels and lived there for about two years, among residents who had been there for decades.

DARK DAYS (2000) is about this community, a city that never sees the sun beneath the city that never sleeps.

With no money for a crew and conditions no ordinary crew could work in, the tunnel's residents became his crew. They hauled gear down ladders, built the lights, laid dolly track on shopping-cart wheels along the rails.

Mid-production, Amtrak moved to evict everyone. So Singer and photographer Margaret Morton went to the Coalition for the Homeless and fought until they secured federal housing vouchers, real apartments, for the people in the film.

The movie's ending is not staged. You watch these men and women walk out of the dark and into homes of their own, and it happened because making the film made it happen.