My Brooklyn

If you get a chance, go see My Brooklyn. It's playing this week at reRun Theater in Dumbo, as part of Adam Schartoff's wonderful screening series, FILMWAX, whose website is still on 2012, but who you should follow anyhow. My Brooklyn is about gentrification of the downtown Brooklyn Fulton and Albee Mall areas. The corporate takeovers might be a better way to put it. If I had a lot more time, I would write more about it, but it follows the displacement of many shop owners and shoppers, the organizing by FUREE to stop it, and a breakdown of public and private interests, as well as the racial and economic injustice that drove it all. Plus, you get to have the distinct and awkward experience of watching it in a lovely theater/gastropub in a gentrified neighborhood. And you get to support all sorts of good people while you're at it.

But what I will write about, just briefly because there's a lot going on over here this morning, is how great it feels sometimes to sit in a small movie theater that someone has lovingly put together with car seats and beer, and watch films programmed by a truly community-minded film lover. My first found community was in an environment like this, when I found and then was lucky enough to work at Railroad Square Cinema, an independent cinema in Waterville, Maine, and my life would not be nearly as rich if not for spaces like this and the people who create them.