Max Simkin repairs shoes in the same New York shop that has been in his family for generations. Disenchanted with the grind of daily life, Max stumbles upon a magical heirloom that allows him to step into the lives of his customers and see the world in a new way. Sometimes walking in another man's...
Locked away from society in an apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the Angulo brothers learn about the outside world through the films that they watch. Nicknamed ‘The Wolfpack’, the brothers spend their childhood reenacting their favorite films using elaborate home-made props and...
Dash Snow rejected a life of privilege to make his own way as an artist on the streets of downtown New York City in the late 1990s. Developing from a notorious graffiti tagger into an international art star, he documented his drug- and alcohol-fueled nights with the surrogate family he formed with...
Leon Gast's musical documentary reveals New York City's Latin culture and features live performances of salsa greats The Fania All Stars and The Spanish Speaking People of New York. A document of urban American Hispanic culture, Gast's film captures the rhythms of New York's Spanish Harlem, from...
Artist Taylor Denise sets out to make her first painting, which also happens to be her largest work to-date. As she embarks on this creative process of making shit because it looks cool, she's met with comradery, debauchery, and people's brains interrupting art whatever way they want to-ery.
Simon is a street retailer, his shop a corner on the lower east side in New York, his stock bootleg cassette tapes, the ambience provided via boombox. He scrounges food from restaurants, exists on vodka and peanut butter, sleeps on the floor, and cares for an unloved cat. Marty, who may be an old...
Real-life kung fu master Nathan Ingram stars in this gritty, low-budget martial arts epic as a local karate school owner who clashes with a gang of drug traffickers posing as the owners of a rival dojo. Director Charlie Ahearn (who helmed the landmark hip-hop film Wild Style) used the housing...
Johnny Thunders was the legendary hard-living rock'n'roll guitarist who inspired glam-metal, punk and the music scene in general. 'Looking For Johnny' is a 90-minute film that documents Thunders' career from his beginnings to his tragic death in 1991. The film examines Johnny Thunders' career from...
Filmed in documentary-style, the film follows the character of Gringo, a young man looking for fortune in New York, only to fall into heroin addiction.
Shot over the course of 18 months in New York City's Lower East Side, METHADONIA sheds light on the inherent flaws of legal methadone treatments for heroin addiction by profiling eight addicts, in various stages of recovery and relapse, who attend the New York Center for Addiction Treatment...
Filmed on the rooftops of lower Manhattan, this performance film features the original Last Poets performing 28 numbers adapted from their legendary Concept-East Poetry appearance at New York's Paperback Theater in 1969. Described as “a conspiracy of ritual, street theater, soul music and cinema."
Legendary underground cartoonist Spain Rodriguez and his friends -- cartoonists Robert Crumb and Jay Kinney and cultural critic Susie Bright -- discuss Spain's art and his life as an outlaw biker, '60s figure and social satirist.
1989, New York City's Alphabet City and East Village. A year after the Tompkins Square Park Riot, squatters and their community allies try to stop the demolition of their building after an arson. Police forces occupy the neighborhood while the demolition continues. A portrait of an East Village...
There’s no one taste or flavor to define a neighborhood, especially one like the Lower East Side. Follow us on a culinary journey of food traditions born out of tenement life. Using historic and archival recipes, oral histories, scholarly interviews, and special guests Padma Lakshmi and Michael...
Two workers leave boxes of explosives with a push cart street vendor while they visit a bar. They return drunk and accidentally drop a box of nitro powder, causing an explosion that wrecks the block and blows off the vendor’s arm. A policeman shows up to the carnage and tries to replace the...
