UnionDocs
-
Short Film Premiere: “Afterimage” Explores Memories of Moviegoing in Ridgewood, Queens
Last week, Filmmaker published my Spring 2026 print issue report on the crop of communal cinema offerings in Ridgewood, Queens. There’s Low Cinema, co-founded by John Wilson and the first theater to open in the neighborhood in nearly 100 years; Music Movie Mondays, curated by Shannon Wiedemeyer at the bar/venue Cassette; Ridgewood Community Cinema, co-created by Ali Jaffery with regular screenings hosted at Stone Circle Theater and Ridgewood Commons; UnionDocs, a non-fiction film center and theater that relocated from Williamsburg to Ridgewood; and the recently-shuttered Seneca Cinema, which allowed attendees to submit ranked-choice ballots to vote on the evening’s movie […]
by Natalia Keogan on Apr 28, 2026 -
How Ridgewood Became New York City’s Communal Cinema Hub
A white, windowless storefront in Ridgewood, Queens, has the distinction of being the neighborhood’s first new cinema in nearly 100 years. Co-founded last year by filmmaker John Wilson alongside collaborators Davis Fowlkes and Cosmo Bjorkenheim, Low Cinema features 42 seats (sourced second-hand), digital and 16mm projection, and even a papier-mâché E.T. Handmade by Wilson, the cheerful alien hovers beneath the ceiling by the front door. The day I visited the microcinema in late February, I was greeted by a veritable cinematic symphony. Corn was freshly popping, ticket holders poured in for an afternoon showing of Nirvanna the Band the Show […]
by Natalia Keogan on Apr 21, 2026 -
“My Filmmaking is a Child of Mark Zuckerberg”: Wayne Koestenbaum on The Collective, Pandemic Exhaustion and Taking Up Filmmaking
“So abundant were the apples, we left them on the ground to rot. We regret the rot, but not the abundance.” These lines close “Tortoise,” one of the “fables” collected in Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Cheerful Scapegoat, the most recent of the 21 books he’s published across the last three decades. His written output—which ranges the terrains of prose and poetry, fiction and criticism, theory, memoir, and styles not yet named, typically collapsing as many of these terms as possible in a given sentence (his métier)—would alone qualify as an abundance. That he has, in more recent years, supplemented this body […]
by Phil Coldiron on Dec 9, 2021 -
Watch: Living Los Sures‘ Short Film, Division Avenue
The second of three short films from UnionDocs Living Los Sures project we’re screening here at Filmmaker, Division Avenue is an experimental film referencing one of the most traveled thoroughfares in New York, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Opening with a jaw-dropping quote from the BQE’s chief architect, Robert Moses, the film, directed by Anne-Katrine Hansen and Janna Kyllastinen, uses an aggressive cello score by Stanza Vaubel and a series of harshly poetic images to capture the violence of this borough-slicing roadway. Here’s the description of the film from its Vimeo page: Division Avenue (2014) is an experimental short film about one […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 14, 2016 -
Watch: Álvaro, from UnionDocs Living Los Sures Project
Inspired by Diego Echeverria’s 1984 documentary, Los Sures, Living Los Sures is an expansive documentary produced over five years by 60 artists at Brooklyn’s UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art. Premiering online today here at Filmmaker is Álvaro, directed by Alexandra Lazarowich, Elizabeth Dealaune Warren, Daniel J Wilson & Chloe Zimmerman, a short doc about the daily ritual of longtime Southside, Brooklyn resident Álvaro Brandon. Timed to the restoration and Metrograph screening of Echeverria’s cinema verite work, about the largely Puerto Rican and Dominican community of the Southside of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Living Los Sures consists of 40 short films, the interactive […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 7, 2016 -
From River of Grass to Living Los Sures: George Schmalz on Kickstarter’s New Curated Restoration Initiative
As part of a new restoration initiative, Kickstarter is partnering with various distributors, filmmakers and organizations to raise funds to preserve and proliferate significant and niche films on the verge of obsolescence. The first five projects to campaign through the site are River of Grass, Kelly Reichardt’s wonderful, underseen debut; a Kino Lorber selection of “Pioneers of African Cinema,” presented by DJ Spooky; the German exploitation film Bloody Friday; Living Los Sures, UnionDocs’ update on the 1984 documentary Los Sures; and the VHS ’90s horror flick, Jungle Trap. There are distribution plans in place for all of the films, should the necessary funds come through: Oscilloscope is planning a VOD, DVD and […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Feb 11, 2015 -
The POV Hackathon: Advancing Web Documentary
A few months ago, I got to participate in StoryCode‘s hackathon for narrative media (you can read about it here), and one of the thoughts I walked away with was that, while creating transmedia properties around fictional narratives is very rewarding, something I really wanted to do was delve deeper into the world of nonfiction transmedia. So I was excited to learn about a documentary transmedia hack sponsored by POV and held this past weekend at their office in DUMBO. If anyone in America understands social documentary, it’s the makers of this PBS series, which has won nearly 100 major awards–Oscars, Emmys, […]
by Randy Astle on Aug 16, 2012
