One might argue that the plight of insufficiently humanized ad agency professionals is less immediate and urgent than that of the oft-dehumanized subjects in Allie Light and Irving Saraf’s Empress Hotel (screening again Wed/29, 6:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki; May 7, 12:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki). The film, which screened on Saturday, is a series of interlaced portraits of residents in a San Francisco SRO, located a quick jog up from the downtown shopping nexus, in the TL on Eddy Street -- really not a world away, as the saying goes, just on a stretch avoided by tourists and most people living, working, and/or entertaining themselves in San Francisco. The residents, all previously homeless, are part of a city-wide program striving to link the issues of health and housing.

The interior of the Empress might be the first thing to unsettle filmgoers’ notions -- though it may not be entirely representative of the general population of SROs. The lobby is filled with natural light and has hardwood floors; some of the rooms have exposed-brick walls like those found in rehabbed loft spaces and industrial-chic restaurants around town. As for its staff, general manager Roberta Goodman coproduced the film with Light and Saraf, and this involvement, if it necessarily affects the nature of the documentary, mirrors her commitment to bettering the lives of the hotel’s tenants (one jokingly refers to her as “Mommy”), and to the philosophy of the larger program.

As the three filmmakers emphasized in the Q&A that followed the screening, they have no desire to gloss over the environment at the Empress. There is drug addiction and severe mental illness. Subjects who initially present themselves as clean and sober on camera are later seen to be semiregularly smoking crack. Tenants are evicted for various forms of antisocial behavior. One subject says of the place that “this is as bad as it gets” and that “85 percent of the building is rejects of life.” Another day, however, finds her expressing a considerably sunnier outlook; one senses the possibility that better living through chemistry may be involved. In any case, this place is clearly better, safer, and saner than the alternative a few feet out the door. And if progress is slow and incremental and sometimes halts altogether, the film also depicts people moving forward with their lives, or getting back to some semblance of the ones they had long before they ended up here.

Other highlights of the weekend: Karim Dridi’s Marseilles-set Khamsa (screening again Wed/29, 6:30 p.m., PFA) tracks the urban wanderings of 13-year-old Marco, who skips out on foster care and heads for the encampment where his Roma extended family live. Dridi himself lived in a Roma encampment for a year and a half in preparation, selected nonprofessional actors from within the community, and developed a script based on the lives of his cast. The resulting film subtly but painfully constructs a history of erratic familial connections out of Marco’s present-day situation, one that drives his impulses and deeds, his need for a sense of belonging and home that continues to evade him.

Don't Let Me Drown: we are young, heartache to heartache we stand.

A slightly older pair of teenagers struggle with their own familial fractures at the center of Cruz Angeles’s Don’t Let Me Drown (screening again Mon/4, 4 p.m., Sundance Kabuki), set in Brooklyn in the wake of 9/11, with the smoke from the towers still browning the skies of Lower Manhattan. Lalo, a Mexican American kid with a soft, introspective side he hides from his trash-talking, booty-chasing friends, meets Stefanie, a tough, solitary Dominican American girl suffering through scenes of rupture and breakdown at home, and the two struggle through something resembling first love in the face of virulent parental antagonism. Angeles and his Oakland-raised screenwriting partner, Maria Topete, have made a film that, like Khamsa, feels true to its young characters’ lives, moodily shifting from emotion to emotion, at times sweet and funny and tender and at others anxious and overshadowed by individual repercussions from the tragedy of the towers.

The San Francisco International Film Festival runs through May 7.