Shot over eight years, Dogtown Redemption is an intimate story of recyclers in West Oakland, a journey through a landscape of love and loss, devotion and addiction, prejudice and poverty. Following the lives of four recyclers, from a former minister to a Korean American ex–punk rock drummer, the film chronicles their battles to survive in Oakland’s Dogtown neighborhood, an area battered by addiction, violence, and unemployment—and about to be changed by gentrification. The question of who owns our garbage makes these otherwise marginal characters important voices in a conflict over race, class, mental health, and space in a modern American city.