Juan Monroy

Ten summers ago, I taught a six-week summer class at NYU on New York Independent filmmaking. The class was based on my own interests in New York City as an historical center for independent, experimental, and avant-garde filmmaking. This fact was a key factor in my moving here after college.

Looking back, there were three distinct highlights:

1. We screened the full three-hour, two-screen diptych of Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls.
2. Nick Zedd shook me down for money, years after I ran the course, because he had learned that I screened his films in this class.
3. I saw, for the first time, the Diego Echeverria film Los Sures, a 1984 documentary of the then-Puerto Rican enclave of South Williamsburg. The film’s title is Spanish for “the Southsiders” and refers to the residents who dominated the neighborhood in the 1980s.

Over the years, Los Sures has reemerged through the efforts of Brooklyn-based UnionDocs. UnionDocs remixed the original film and created an immersive documentary project called Living Los Sures. Both films screened at the New York Film Festival in 2014, thirty years after the Echeverria film premiered there.

The original film is remarkable today because it documented a part of Williamsburg that has undergone radical changes over the last thirty-plus years, and the Living Los Sures project attempts to excavate and preserve the culture of the Southside.

Tomorrow, the Cinema Studies Department at NYU, is screening the 1984 film and hosting a presentation about the current and ongoing Living Los Sures project. This is a rare opportunity to see this film. Until the original film is available for purchase, you’ll have to settle for screening a 16mm or VHS copy at the New York Public Library.

Admission to tomorrow’s screening is free, but seating is limited.