In her 1999 documentary Voices of Cabrini: Remaking Chicago’s Public Housing, filmmaker Ronit Bezalel threw a premonitory light on a group of Cabrini Green residents as they watched the gears of the machine that would eventually uproot their community begin to turn.

Back then, the Plan for Transformation — a decade-spanning design to redistribute the city’s poor into economically-mixed communities — was still a budding twinkle in the eye of Mayor Richard M. Daley. But at Cabrini, a neighborhood scarred by nearly half a century of crime and drug activity, demolition of the development’s high-rise buildings was already four years in and residents had a decent idea of what was coming.

In Voices of Cabrini, which received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Award, Bezalel found residents in every stage of separation: From hordes of protesters marching through the public housing block and chanting “Cabrini Green is not for sale!” to a father explaining to his son why leaving the violence and poverty of Cabrini might be a good thing.

As the film closes on a scene at a barbershop where a group of young and old men discuss strategies for keeping the community together, it’s clear that the story is far from over.

Making good on that promise, Bezalel is back with Cabrini Green: Mixing it Up, a follow-up that documents the lives of some of those same residents who are now fighting to make their way back into a changed Cabrini. Covering a 15-year period, the film follows a cast of characters, including a student, a community activist and a returning resident, as they pick up the pieces in a neighborhood that they still call home.

The trailer for the film cuts into a scene of Mayor Daley (who’s now counting down the days until his retirement) discussing the finer points of the Plan for Transformation with a group of black teenagers at a library near Cabrini.

“Take it like this,” said Deral Willis, addressing Daley with one eye on the camera, “If you grew up in Cabrini Green, would you want them to take your memories?”

Memories, said Daley, are always in the mind, “but everyone changes.”

“You can’t live in the past,” he added.

Clearly some do.

Skyline caught up with Bezalel and co-producer Brenda Schumacher to talk about what’s at stake for residents in Cabrini Green: Mixing it Up.

Ronit Bezalel: We’re looking at residents who have been displaced, many of whom have slipped through the cracks and the Chicago Housing Authority doesn’t know where they’ve gone, and we’re looking at the residents who have returned and what life is like living in mixed-income and the uneasy tension between the condo owners and the former residents of Cabrini Green.

Brenda Schumacher: We start the film with Mayor Daley and his famous speech saying that any resident who wants to return will be able to. The first film left off with residents talking about not trusting that, and so now we’re able to take a look at what really happened and to see how many people returned. Although estimates are different by different studies, a very low number of people are actually going to be able to return.

RB: I’d always planned to do a sequel. I finished Voices of Cabrini in 1999, when the Plan for Transformation was just announced, so I knew there needed to be another film years later to look at the impact of this plan on residents.

Conditions at Cabrini have shifted greatly since you began documenting the neighborhood. As some — though not all — of Cabrini’s public and subsidized housing has returned or remained in area, have you seen any change in resident sentiments toward the Plan for Transformation?

BS: People were skeptical from the beginning, and I think they still are because it has played out in ways that many were hoping it wouldn’t. One reason that people haven’t been able to return is that a lot of the new mixed-income built has been two- or three-bedroom [units], and Cabrini families are often larger. So just by virtue of that some people can’t return.

BS: We have seen some people who feel like it has worked, but I guess the question is, at what cost? One of the women featured in our film had an opportunity to move back into the mixed-income units, and she fit all the qualifications except in one way: her daughter, who at the time was in a really rough high school, got in a fight at school and got a police record. Because of that, the entire family would have been barred from moving into the mixed-income housing unless they didn’t bring her along.

So in some ways this is a success story, because she did move back into the building. However, she had to choose to not bring her daughter with her. So it really divided a family, and it’s a choice that many people from a middle-class background would not have to make.

RB: Residents there know that their community is vilified, stereotyped and known across the world as being “the worst housing project in America.”

BS: I can’t help but think about the day that we were at the home of Annie Ricks [the last resident to leave the Cabrini high rises] and she was talking about all the trophies her children had won at programs in Cabrini and how sad she was to be leaving. The next day we were out in front of her building and it was a complete mad house of media — people were pushing and shoving, the building was locked up and there was a police line holding them back. When Ricks came out, she had one minute in front of the media and then she got in the car and drove away really fast. I thought of all the media that had been camped out there for hours to get that story, and I wondered if anyone would ever think to go and get her story again.

I think in a way that’s what happens at Cabrini. There’s a story and it’s told in a way that’s going to grab people’s attention, but it doesn’t really look at the human impact. I think the media attention can help and bring some awareness, but it’s so sensationalized and one-dimensional that it’s really been hard for the residents to tell their story in a meaningful way.