Stages is a moving and surprisingly funny vérité exploration of the unexpected power of the simple act of storytelling. In New York City's oldest community center, a group of older Puerto Rican women and inner-city youth come together to create an original play out of the stories of their lives. Weaving together themes of immigration, identity, aging and coming of age, Stages offers an intimate portrait of an unlikely ensemble, transformed by the...

In this extraordinarily intimate film, seven years in the making, we are taken into the depths of the Hasidim's joyous, sometimes harsh, and often beautiful world. With their use of the Yiddish language, their distinctive clothes and their strict observance to Jewish ritual and law, the Hasidim are considered by many an insular people with little connection to mainstream America. And yet their values are those that many Americans find most precious:...

Brooklyn Matters reveals how a few powerful men tried to tilt the Brooklyn landscape in favor of big real estate at the expense of urban livability. Disregarding time-honored urban planning principles and manipulating a desperate need in the African-American community for jobs and affordable housing, they pushed their own interests forward--luxury housing and a 20,000 seat sports arena. The film poses vital, timely questions that are relevant to cities...

This acclaimed documentary explores the surprisingly domestic subterranean world of a homeless community living in a train tunnel beneath NYC. Through stories heartbreaking and hilarious, tunnel dwellers reveal their reasons for taking refuge and their struggle to survive underground. With a hypnotic soundtrack by legendary DJ Shadow, DARK DAYS is still an enduring classic, more than fifteen years after its initial release. Winner of the Cinematography...

The compelling stories of factories that flourish in Brooklyn, NY, challenge the notion that manufacturing is dead in America. Workers reveal how their jobs bring not only regular pay checks, but meaningful relationships, enhanced self-esteem, and pride in themselves and their products. Made in Brooklyn has lessons about the economy for the entire nation.

The rebuilding of Ground Zero is the most architecturally, politically, and emotionally complex construction project in recent American history. The struggle to develop these sixteen acres of sacred lands has encompassed twelve years, nineteen government agencies, and over $20 billion. Aside from the engineering challenges, various constituencies-politicians, developers, architects, insurers, local residents, and relatives of 9/11 victims-profess...

Now, Serpico tells his story in his own words: from his Italian-American roots in Brooklyn to his disillusionment with the NYPD to his riveting account of a dramatic drug bust, and possible set-up that ended with him being shot in the face.

A home of one's own: that's the American dream. But what happens when the dreamers are immigrants, factory workers, and Communists? In the mid-1920s, thousands of Jewish immigrant garment workers managed to catapult themselves out of urban slums and ghettos by pooling their resources and building four cooperatively owned and run apartment complexes in the Bronx. They believed that owning one's home went a long way toward controlling one's fate. At...

Through the eyes of funeral director Isaiah Owens, the beauty and grace of African American funerals are brought to life. Filmed at the Owens Funeral Home in Harlem and the rural South, director Christine Turner's Homegoings takes an up-close look at the rarely seen world of undertaking in the black community, where funeral rites draw on a rich palette of tradition, history and celebration. It reveals the special status of undertakers in the community;...

When a Chinese-American police officer kills an innocent, unarmed Black man in a darkened stairwell of a New York City housing project, it sets off a firestorm of emotion and calls for accountability. When he becomes the first NYPD officer convicted of an on-duty shooting in over a decade, the fight for justice becomes complicated, igniting one of the largest Asian-American protests in history, disrupting a legacy of solidarity, and putting an uneven...