Program 7: On the Loisaida and the Streets of the South Bronx

Film Club
Jaime Barrios, 1968, 23m

The Heart of Loisaida
Beni Matías, Marci Reaven, 1979, 26m 

Housing Court
Beni Matías, William Sarokin, 1985, 30m

Simpson Street
William Sarokin, 1979, 16mm, 23m

The tall buildings and bustling streets of Midtown Manhattan have often drawn the eye of experimental filmmakers looking to explode the perceptual capabilities of cinema. Beyond these locales and explorations of cinematic form there is a strong tradition of radical nonfiction and advocacy in alternative New York cinema that reaches beyond commercial zones. These films are often tied to issues of pressing importance to working-class and immigrant communities in areas beyond the business and leisure districts of Manhattan. Two fecund arenas explored in this mode of committed filmmaking are the Nuyorican Loisaida and the South Bronx, areas that have been treated in narrow and stereotypical ways throughout mainstream film history. This set of films conveys both the dynamism of these spaces—as in the work of Jaime Barrios, documenting his storefront Film Club, a teaching space and micro cinema set up in the early 1960s—but also the harsh political realities of dealing with the bureaucracy of municipal government. A strong throughline that unites the films are issues of housing and displacement, especially the will of grassroots activism and sweat equity to remake and repopulate parts of the city that have been deemed unusable and uninhabitable by city authorities.