On Tuesday evening, I stepped out of Event Cinemas on George Street after watching The Best of the Best – a documentary by the Rev. Bill Crews featuring years of real-time stories about Sydney’s most vulnerable of people. Walking along the very streets Rev. Crews had talked about it suddenly struck me: I can’t “review” this documentary, not in any traditional sense. What it asks of any viewer isn’t critique – but witness.

This 90minute documentary draws from his breakthrough online series Stories From the Edge, which began in 2013. Filmed across thirteen years, the series has become a vital record of the social realities that sit beneath Sydney’s polished surface.

So here it goes – and as Rev. Bill Crews would say, without the fluff.

Rev. Bill Crews and his team have been a steady presence on Sydney’s streets, founding what began as the Exodus Foundation and is now the Rev. Bill Crews Foundation. In Ashfield, he’s something of an institution, known for the work he’s built on the streets and for the voice that’s guided listeners through Sunday Night with Bill Crews.

But while he has a strong media presence his work has never been abstract; it’s lived, daily, shouldertoshoulder with the people who need him most, battling systems that fail them and fighting for the basics; food, safety, dignity, and a chance to survive. The Best of the Best traces that long arc of service offering an unfiltered look at the people who come through his doors. When politics fails and poverty bites, Bill’s faith and frustration pushes him forward, and that daily fight has shaped his entire life’s work. 

It’s a hard watch, but it’s completely compelling as it stands as an archive of people’s lives – lives so marginalised they barely register in the city’s imagination. It doesn’t invite aesthetic judgement; it asks you to look, properly look, at the faces we’ve learned to pass by. A great socialcommentary documentary cuts through sentimentality to expose what’s actually happening, and The Best of the Best does exactly that with a blunt honesty that makes the statistics feel personal. Its success isn’t measured in style but in the impact it leaves behind.

That breadth of legacy sits beneath every frame. You feel it in the trust people place in him, in the way the camera is allowed into moments that would otherwise disappear, unrecorded. We learn their names, we see the cycle they’re caught in, and we feel how essential it is to create the conditions that let someone step out of it. Bill has said how difficult it is to curate these stories – so many people on the streets don’t want others to know they’re struggling, don’t want to be seen at their lowest – and that makes the trust in this footage all the more striking.

It’s clear from the first frame: no staging, no smoothing of edges – this is about real people in real crises, captured with a level of access only possible because Bill has earned their trust over half a lifetime. The film unfolds in short vignettes – just enough background to understand how someone ended up where they are, just enough future to glimpse what they’re hoping for, and always the quiet, grinding obstacles standing in their way.  And you feel it, too, in the steady presence of the volunteers and staff and wider community who have stood with and beside Bill for decades – a diverse kaleidoscope of people who show up, day after day, to hold others up. This isn’t a curated narrative; it’s the flicker of hope, the drag of desperation, and the long memory of a city that rarely keeps one for those living on its margins.

The hardedged reality behind The Best of the Best is written in numbers as stark as the faces on screen. 

• More than 122,000 Australians were homeless on the last Census night, a figure that has climbed steadily since 2013 despite billions in government spending. 

• Domestic and family violence now stands as the leading cause of that displacement, with tens of thousands of women and children pushed into crisis each year. 

• Nearly 800,000 children live in poverty

• Mental illness threads through these stories with a grim consistency – not as a footnote but as a companion to housing insecurity, financial collapse, and generational disadvantage. 

These aren’t abstract statistics; they are the architecture impacting lives.

Hearing Bill speak afterwards, you could feel how his faith has become a form of resistance in a political landscape that keeps failing the people he serves; so many of those in The Best of the Best are gone now – their stories held only in the footage and in Bill’s memory,  and despite the personal toll, he still talks about the work itself with a kind of stubborn, enduring love. 

In the end, that’s what The Best of the Best asks of us — to look, to listen, and not to turn away. Because every person living with homelessness or poverty was once somebody’s darling, loved and held long before hardship took over. Witnessing their stories to understand them is the least we can do.

Best of the Best – Stories From the Edge (Bill Crews TV)  https://www.billcrewstv.org.au/ (billcrewstv.org.au in Bing)

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