Please note: cinema seating is limited. Once the cinema reaches capacity, overflow seating will be available in an adjacent event space, with livestream access to the screening and conversation.
Q&A with Directors Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno moderated by Nathan Silver
This Emmy Award-winning documentary tells the stories of six "ordinary" people who live or work along New York City's Third Avenue, which runs for sixteen miles through Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, cutting through the complex social strata of the city to reveal wildly different economic and ethnic subcultures. The subjects speak for themselves, offering candid glimpses into the disparate worlds of a junkyard dealer who steals cars, a Bowery bum and the wife he abandoned, a welfare mother living in a condemned building with her five children, a male prostitute, a devout Puerto Rican factory worker, and an aging Italian barber and his wife. Called "a triumph of its kind" by The Washington Post, this unsentimental portrait of the uncommon lives of common people is a subjective sociological study of survival in urban America.
This film will be preceded by:
Video Television Review: Downtown Community Television Center
VTR, 1975, 29 min
As an introduction to our series, this interview is a window into the early days of DCTV. Produced as part of the Video Tape Review series of New York public television station WNET/Thirteen, it features interviews with Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno interspersed with excerpts from their extensive body of work documenting everyday life in Chinatown and Lower East Side of New York City, from vibrant performances by neighboring arts organizations to a rowdy school board meeting, into Cuba.