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Arts & Entertainment

"My Brooklyn: The Battle for The Soul Of A City"

The filmmakers push to finish a documentary about dramatic changes in Downtown Brooklyn and surrounding neighborhoods, and wonder: How much are we responsible for the gentrification?

When Kelly Anderson, the director of the unfinished movie “My Brooklyn,” graduated from college, she considered herself an artist. Artists moved to Brooklyn then—as they would like to do now.

Her Brooklyn is not a single neighborhood. She first lived in Park Slope with her partner, then after a break-up shifted to “the block depicted in Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude” in Boerum Hill.  After a detour to the East Village, she bought a place in Fort Greene, but left the neighborhood eight years later for Clinton Hill. Last year, she settled in Sunset Park. “I’m a professor—a full-time professor, not an adjunct,” says Anderson, who is Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies at Hunter College. “But I could not afford anywhere but Sunset Park.”

This thoroughly modern migration, escaping a series of gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhoods in search of more affordable ones, helped inspire the film on which Anderson has been working since 2006: “It felt important to me to confront my role in the process I saw unfolding around me, and to understand how I was driving it (at least in part), and what I could do in response. It was an ethical as well as a political investigation for me, and deeply personal.”

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As personal as it became, the film actually started as somebody else’s project. Allison Lirish Dean was a graduate urban planning student at Hunter when she began studying the Fulton Street Mall, which she found to be a vibrant “community of color” that city officials nevertheless felt the need to alter, putting in place a rezoning in 2004 that displaced some 100 businesses, encourage luxury condo development, and, Dean believes, disturbed many of the people who shopped and socialized there. Once she had finished her study, she thought it would make a good film: “I had met all these amazing characters, people with a lot of heart and soul, whose voices needed to be heard."

It is easy to see the borough of Brooklyn as a work in progress, and so it makes some sense that “My Brooklyn,” the film that Anderson is directing and Dean is producing, has yet to be completed. Unlike Brooklyn, though, “My Brooklyn” will in fact be finished someday soon —at least, its creators hope so. They are raising money to get it done on Kickstarter, the two-year-old website that has raised more than $75 million for more than 10,000 “creative projects” from more than 800,000 donors contributing as little as a dollar at a time.

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The Kickstarter campaign for “My Brooklyn” must raise $20,000 by Saturday, Sept. 3 at 4:35 p.m. If they don’t raise the full amount, according to the rules of Kickstarter, the money is given back to the donors.

If they do raise the money, they say, they will spend it on a film editor.

That editor will put final shape to a film, subtitled “The Battle For The Soul Of A City,” that chronicles the sometimes startling changes in Brooklyn communities over the past decade, and argues that these have not been the result of any kind of “natural” evolution but of commercially-fueled public policy.

For example, “in Williamsburg, there were many artists and that gave the neighborhood a certain cache with real estate developers,” says Dean, who lived in that neighborhood. “That wasn't the artists' fault. The developers and real estate investors and others who stand to make money off neighborhoods skillfully use artists' presence to put pressure on the city to make policy changes, like the rezoning that happened there also in 2004. That rezoning changed that neighborhood dramatically within just a few years.”

The filmmakers hope their documentary will be useful as an organizing tool, and plan to accompany it with “Brooklyn The Game,” downloadable on mobile devices, which will present walking tours that allow the players to see the past, present and planned future of a variety of locations around Downtown Brooklyn.

In a rough cut that they created for their Kickstarter campaign, they quote Mayor Michael Bloomberg saying: “If you don’t like wealthy people or successful profit-making businesses, you’re not going to have a city.”

The people behind “My Brooklyn” obviously do not see this as a compelling argument for the changes to their borough.

“For those who want to be surrounded by one economic class of people, pay an exorbitant amount for housing, and shop at all the chain stores you could visit in a suburban mall, the changes might be desirable,” Anderson says. “I'm not in that group, clearly.”

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