Activists on Screen: Affordable Housing

Join us for a screening and conversation about struggles for affordable housing in New York past and present. On the occasion of Fair Housing Month, we're screening Rabble Rousers (2022, 83 min) and a sneak preview of the upcoming film The Co-op: The Kids of Dorie Miller. Learn about the decades-long fight for affordable housing in Cooper Square led by organizer Frances Goldin and the history of The Dorie Miller Housing Co-operative, New York City’s first unsegregated housing cooperative.

A conversation with Rabble Rousers filmmakers Kathryn Barnier and Ryan Joseph, and The Co-Op producer Chanelle Aponte Pearson follows the screenings, moderated by filmmaker and writer Cassim Shepard.

About the films: 
The Co-op: The Kids of Dorie Miller is a character-based, topic-driven documentary following one New Yorker as she uncovers her family’s history in New York City’s first unsegregated housing cooperative. Weaving together verite footage, interviews with academic and policy experts, minimalist animation, archival footage, and testimonies from current and former Co-op residents, the film interrogates inequity in homeownership and explores the history and future of affordable housing through the lens of The Dorie Miller Housing Co-op (“The Co-op”).

Rabble Rousers: In 1959 New York City announced a “slum clearance plan” by Robert Moses that would displace 2,400 working class and immigrant families, and dozens of businesses, from the Cooper Square section of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Guided by the belief that urban renewal should benefit - not displace - residents, a working mother named Frances Goldin and her neighbors formed the Cooper Square Committee (CSC) and launched a campaign to save the neighborhood. Over five decades they fought politicians, developers, white flight, government abandonment, blight, violence, arson, drugs, and gentrification - cyclical forces that have destroyed so many working class neighborhoods across the US. Through tenacious organizing and hundreds of community meetings, they not only held their ground but also developed a vision of community control. Fifty three years later, they established the state’s first community land trust - a diverse, permanently affordable neighborhood in the heart of the “real estate capital of the world.”

About the speakers:
Chanelle Aponte Pearson (she/they) is an African American and Puerto Rican filmmaker from The Bronx, New York. They directed the Gotham Award-winning series 195 LEWIS, co-produced the Blackstar Film Festival jury winner FUCKED LIKE A STAR, and co-created the annual Black Women’s Film Conference with the New Negress Film Society, a creative collective centering the work of Black women and non-binary filmmakers. They are currently executive producer for THE CO-OP: THE KIDS OF DORIE MILLER, a feature documentary about New York City’s first non-segregated housing cooperative. 

Kathryn Barnier has many editing credits including My Brooklyn, Banished: How Whites Drove Blacks Out of Town in America, Detroit 48202, The Gun Deadlock, Bill Moyers’ Journal Specials (nominated for two Emmys), The American President (ten-hour PBS series), and The Cronkite Quarterly. Banished won prizes at both the Sundance Film Festival and the Miami International Film Festival and aired on PBS. Two films, Carvalho’s Journey and Miriam, Home Delivery debuted recently at the NY Jewish Film Festival and DOCNY, respectively. Three projects, The Search for Solutions, All About Looking (featuring artist Jim Dine) and Banished were released theatrically in New York City.

Ryan Joseph is a multimedia content producer (photography, graphic design and video production) whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Jet, En Foco, Urban Ink Magazine and various other publications. He co-produced his first feature documentary The Rink, which won best short documentary in Newark’s Black Film Festival, with Sarah Friedland in 2013. He was the field technician for Antarctic Edge: 70 Degrees South, produced in partnership with the National Science Foundation and Rutgers Filmmaking Center, in 2014.  Currently Ryan works as Digital Content Producer and Digital Production Manager for Jersey City’s Communication Department. When he is not working he enjoys spending time with his family.

Cassim Shepard is a Distinguished Lecturer at the Spitzer School of Architecture at City College, where he directs the Urban Studies program. Trained as an urban planner, geographer, and documentary filmmaker, he writes and makes documentary media about cities and places. His video installation work about cities around the world has been exhibited at venues including the Venice Architecture Biennale, The Museum of the City of New York, the United Nations, the Pavillon de l’Arsenale (Paris), the African Centre for Cities (Cape Town), and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. His writing on urbanism has appeared in Next City, Places, Domus, Public Culture, Strangers Guide, and more. His first book, Citymakers: The Culture and Craft of Practical Urbanism, was published by Monacelli Press in 2017. He was the founding editor-in-chief of Urban Omnibus, an online publication of The Architectural League of New York, and is currently completing a new book on the intellectual history of self-help housing.

Activists on Screen is a new documentary film series examining NYC’s longstanding engagement with social activism, inspired by the Museum's centennial and our ongoing exhibition Activist New York. The series is programmed by Sarah Seidman, MCNY's Puffin Foundation Curator of Social Activism, and film curator Melissa Lyde, founder and creator of Alfreda's Cinema.