Once warehouses, now a dead ringer for Miami. via Facebook
Since Brooklyn’s gentrification is a multi-faceted and endlessly fascinating subject, it only makes sense that people keep discussing it. We’ve already had one movie about it, the mournful-looking, talking head-heavy My Brooklyn, that focused especially on downtown Brooklyn, the Fulton Mall and the Barclays Center. Now Williamsburg’s gentrification gets put under the cinematic microscope in Gut Renovation, a movie that should once and for all solve this entire problem. Ahaha, just kidding!
Su Friedrich is an artist who moved to Williamsburg in 1989, helping her girlfriend and her girlfriend’s ex renovate a musty old loft space. There they lived, judging by the trailer, in a bohemian paradise. That is until, zoning changes came to the waterfront and a bunch of guys in suits literally showed up to take pictures and start knocking down old buildings to put up condos, both enormous and slightly less big.
Gut Renovation looks like it’s more of the “rage against the dying of the light” documentary, at least judging by the way the trailer is cut and the scene where Friedrich screams out her window at some property developers, heavy on the emotional cues and “us against them” attitude. It plays for a week at the Film Forum, from March 6 to March 12 if you want to see it and relive some recent history. And be sure to look out for a documentary about the gentrification of Bushwick in, oh let’s say, a month or two.
