July 14, 2012, 8pm

Sternberg Park (map)

Preview screening and celebration of an amazing neighborhood project.

In the late seventies and early eighties, South Williamsburg was one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City. It was troubled by drugs and violence, full of abandoned real estate, and badly under-served. Los Sures, a documentary from 1984 by Diego Echeverria, skillfully represents the challenges of this time, while also celebrating a community that was connected, coherent and full of culture.

UnionDocs is in the midst of an experimental project that revisits this film and creates a constellation of companion documentary works that will update, annotate, and spiral off from the original. The final result will be Living Los Sures, an interactive, multi-layer documentary that seeks not just to extract important and unusual stories from the place, but to also create new shared histories and relationships between neighbors.

This special preview event in Sternberg Park (which actually makes an appearance in the film) will include an outdoor screening of a selection of these projects and fragments of the original film, along with live performance and musical elements. It provides an early look at a broad-scale project that will be developed over many year-long cycles with different collections of documentary artists.