Editor Kathryn Barnier, filmmaker and IMA alum Ryan Joseph and IMA professor Kelly Anderson are sharing their film, Rabble Rousers: Frances Goldin and the Fight for Cooper Square this weekend at the Festival Internacional de cine documental Santiago Álvarez in Cuba!
The film won Best Director at the Santiago Alvarez Festival, and got a special award for Journalistic Excellence from Radio Havana Cuba.
About the film:
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.”