Between Neighborhoods / Screening

Between Neighborhoods / Screening  

Presented by Terraza 7 

Date: Monday, March 11th, 2024

Time: 7:00 pm.

Admission: $5 suggested donation

Featuring:

• Between Neighborhoods / Seth Fein

Unisphere turns 60 in April! To mark that anniversary, Seth Fein has been revising his prize-winning documentary about the present and past that orbits the mammoth armillary sphere planted in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park since Robert Moses put it there for the last New York World's Fair. Join Seth for a preview and conversation about Between Neighborhoods (84', 2018, 2024) at Terraza –– where he shot its final scene –– as he completes this new iteration honoring stainless-steel landmark's coming diamond jubilee.

About Between Neighborhoods:

BETWEEN NEIGHBORHOODS (84', 2018, 2024) contemplates in split-screen the global and local histories of immigration and imperialism, social and corporate globalizations that orbit the Unisphere between the age of Trump and AOC and that of Robert Moses, who built the Space Age armillary sphere to center the 1964-65 New York World's Fair at the crossroads of his metropolitan empire, in Queens. Juxtaposing original and archival footage (the result of extensive long-term research), the documentary diptych connects NYC's interborough and international present and past. Winner of the Founders Choice Award for Documentary at the Queens World Film Festival (2017), the video essay began life as an installation exhibited simultaneously at the CUNY Graduate Center and Queens College's Art Gallery and has since screened (and been the subject of symposiums) internationally. This 2024 version is not only entirely remastered but newly draws on significant additional archival research. Among those who helped with the 2024 cut is Ricardo Ponce (sound design), who performs with Lado B directly after the screening. 

About Seth Fein:

Seth Fein is a Brooklyn-born historian and documentary artist who lives and works in Jackson Heights where he founded and operates Seven Local Film. Among his recent works are: Small Kitchens (31' 2019, 2023) –– an observational tone poem that connects and contrasts kitchen work and food between a Nepali restaurant and a Mexican food cart on the Elmhurst-Jackson Heights border under the 7 train, before and across Covid Time –– and The Actor in His Labyrinth (32', 2023), which maps Sebastián Ospina's journey from Colombian TV star to "nomadic" NYC theater actor, observing how his interborough and interamerican travels and travails resonate with those of Simón Bolívar in the play Ospina wrote and performs about the South American Liberator's final trek through Colombia, two centuries earlier. Seth also writes about documentary art; recent essays have appeared in The Village Voice the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Fein's work as a film historian ignited his work as a filmmaker. He's published widely on the transnational history of Golden Age Mexican Cinema as well as Washington's production and distribution of film and TV propaganda in Latin America across the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War (some of which shows up in Between Neighborhoods). Seth did his Ph.D. in history at the University of Texas at Austin has taught film and history at Brooklyn College's Feirstein Graduate Center, Barnard, Columbia, and Yale, among other places. Grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as the Queens Council on the Arts have supported his work as did his year as a Fellow in Multimedia History in Harvard's Charles Warren Center.