UnionDocs

Of Memory & Los Sures (2011) is a hybrid animated documentary film featuring oral histories of longtime residents of Los Sures, a neighborhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Voices of longtime residents of Los Sures, a mostly Puerto Rican neighborhood, are juxtaposed with images suggesting a recently disappearing past. The film weaves their stories, reflecting unique glimpses into collective memory of a place undergoing rapid changes. Through explorations of urban space, the film unearths fragments of history and culture, and recreates those memories through video, photography, archival documents and animation.

An example of a very extended practice in New York City, a city where apparently there is no place anymore for low income and working class people. The detention of Josh and Amron Israel opens a space for hope

SANDWICHED is a short documentary film about Abdulmotaleb, who lives in two realities at the same time: on the surface, he’s the friendly neighborhood bodega guy, but he’s also a refugee from Yemen’s civil war whose wife and children are still stuck back home.

In 2024, an extraordinary phenomenon unfolded in Illinois: the simultaneous emergence of billions of periodical cicadas—an event occurring every 221 years. Part travelogue and essay, the film chronicles the bicentennial encounter of species by following those who listen closely to the cicadas’ songs, while connecting the insect life cycle to the history of America. Through deep listening sessions, and in the quest for hearing the elusive cicada sounds, one may ask: what is an image of the future?

Growing up in the largest affordable housing cooperative in Brooklyn, Cassandra’s world was artfully framed by her mother’s Super-8 camera. Today, still living in the same place, Cassandra examines and edits these remarkable films, gaining insight into the challenges her mother faced as a creative black woman and the importance of her vision.

What happens when you lose something on the subway in New York? Chances are you’ll run into the wise, gentle, and unofficial ambassador of the Transit Authority, Sonny Drayton. Through his humor and intimate personal knowledge of the subway, Sonny invites us to consider what it means to lose and be lost underground, often the last stop for those who’ve fallen through the social safety net and have nowhere else to go. “Last Stop for Lost Property” questions how we value the artifacts of our lives: big and small, cherished and dismissed, tangible and existential.

After 17 years in business, La Villita Bakery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn was forced to close its doors. A victim of rising rents and rapid gentrification, this family owned business was a staple of the working class community that once could afford to live in the area. Chronicling the final days of this beloved bakery, The Last Bread (2013) captures the death of yet another small business in an increasingly homogeneous New York City. La Villita was located on the corner of Grand street and Bedford Ave, the division between the North and the Southside of Williamsburg.

“Why are you recording us?”, “Why are you all green?”,”The price is better, it doesn’t necessarily mean the orange is better.”, “This is creepy.” I’ll wrap my words in paper bags is a mute green screen suit wandering Chinatown as an empty surface waiting to be filled.

“Discard Records [is] a cumulative work responding to my experience as the Artist in Residence at the NY Department of Sanitation. Coupling my experiential research in the agency and my revitalization of their TV studio, this film is a very personal response to a treasure trove of historical material about waste in our current era of the climate crisis. It is not only the preservation of a long lost archive but a contemporary activation that is to be shared as a public artwork in this moment of ecological awareness. Adapting the aesthetics and recycling the materials of the sanitation department, Discard Records is a remixed historical film that is intended to spark new conversations that explore the intimate but often ignored relationship between the public and their waste.” - sTo Len, Director