Filmed guerrilla-style across the 7x7 — natural light, no tripods, no studios — the doc stitches together 30-plus stories from actual San Franciscans into what the filmmaker calls "a cinematic mosaic." Messy, beautiful, weird, and resilient. If you've lived here longer than a lease cycle, you know that's about right.

The central question the film poses is one we've been wrestling with at The Dissent for a while now: Is San Francisco actually coming back?

Here's our take: the city is rising in spite of its government, not because of it. The people featured in this documentary — the scrappy entrepreneurs, the artists working three gigs, the families who refused to leave — they're the ones doing the heavy lifting. Meanwhile, City Hall continues to spend record budgets on programs with dubious results, stack bureaucratic hurdles on small businesses, and hold board meetings that feel more like performance art than governance.

The resilience this documentary captures is real. San Francisco has always drawn a particular kind of stubborn, slightly unhinged optimist — people willing to pay $3,200 for a one-bedroom and still call it worth it. That energy hasn't died. But let's not confuse grassroots grit with a functioning city government.

What makes San Francisco Rising interesting is the format itself. No narrator telling you what to think. No nonprofits patting themselves on the back. Just people talking honestly about their city. That alone is refreshing in an era where every institutional take on SF is either doom-scrolling rage bait or desperate boosterism.

So is SF rising? The honest answer is: parts of it are, and the parts that are rising are doing so because regular people decided not to wait for permission. The city doesn't need another task force or blue-ribbon commission. It needs less red tape and more of whatever these 30-plus San Franciscans are running on.

Give it a watch. Then ask yourself what this city could look like if its leaders got out of the way.