After running away from home, a teenage graffiti artist holds up an unsuspecting MTA worker in a robbery gone right that changes their lives forever.
A single mother and a childless morgue technician are bound together by their relationship to a little girl they have reanimated from the dead.
When the film West Side Story was released in 1961, New York's reviled Puerto Rican community gained some visibility and, over time, both in Spanish Harlem and the Bronx, neighborhoods plagued by poverty, drugs and crime, Hispanic identity was reborn and strengthened, thanks to a syncretic and intentionally popular music that eventually conquered the entire city.
When a successful New York public defender loses his first case, he is pulled into a drug heist by a former client in an effort to beat the broken system at its own game.
Three gutsy kids from a rapidly gentrifying Bronx neighborhood stumble upon a sinister plot to suck all the life from their beloved community.
Colors explores the bonds of a young family living in the Bronx. They are displaced after unforeseen circumstances take the family to unexpected places. Despite the challenges they face, they find joy, hope and each other.
Based on true events, Hold Me Down depicts a day in the life of a 19-year-old single mother in the Bronx who works as a stripper at an illegal nightclub to support her child.
A legendary trainer comes out of retirement to help an underdog boxer fight his way to a better life.
Through archival footage Nicholson tells the story of the real Warriors that walked the streets of New York City in the 1970s and the harsh reality of gang life in a city that seemed to be falling apart.
Thomas Hirschhorn, one of the few Swiss artists of world renown, often touches on social wounds with his provocative works. In 2013, Hirschhorn built a monument for Italian philosopher and communist Antonio Gramsci in a public housing project in the Bronx. The contentious artist collaborated with neighborhood residents whose everyday life is impacted by poverty, unemployment and crime. Conflicts and misunderstandings are bound to arise as Hirschhorn’s absolute devotion to art is confronted with the resident’s lack of prospects and fatalistic outlooks. The «Gramsci Monument» becomes a summer-long experiment where diverse worlds collide: blacks and whites, the art elite and street kids, party people and poets, politicians and philosophers. A nuanced film about art, politics and passion.
A documentary that reveals how a forgotten record by the Incredible Bongo Band helped cement the foundation of hip hop when DJ Herc extended its percussion by playing them back to back, creating an anthem on the streets of the Bronx.
When their latest work is buffed by a rival crew, two determined graffiti writers embark on an elaborate plan to bomb the ultimate location: the New York Mets' Home Run Apple.
Set in the Bronx, BABYGIRL is a bittersweet drama about teenager Lena, who, since she can remember, has watched her mom Lucy squander her life on a series of deadbeat men. When Victor (her mom's latest boy toy) starts hitting on her, Lena sets up an elaborate honey-trap, hoping to show her mom what a scumbag the guy really is. But the plan backfires. Trapped in a twisted love triangle between Victor and her mom, Lena realizes that the only way out is to stand up and confront some difficult home truths.
After a brush with the law, Maria has returned to her gritty Bronx roots to rebuild her life with nothing but a talent for street dance and a burning ambition to prove herself.
The Rizzos, a family who doesn't share their habits, aspirations, and careers with one another, find their delicate web of lies disturbed by the arrival of a young ex-con brought home by Vince, the patriarch of the family, who is a corrections officer in real life, and a hopeful actor in private.
Winner of the New York LOVES Film Award at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2008. Filmed over the course of nine years, Zoned In traces the remarkable real-life journey of 16-year-old Daniel from a Bronx high school to an Ivy League university while simultaneously exploring the role of race and class in the American education system. Narrated by Daniel himself, the movie celebrates the accomplishments of this extraordinary young man but does not shy away from depicting his struggles to fit in amongst the privileged students at his college and his candid questioning of a system that has allowed him to excel but has left so many of his friends and family members behind.
During the economic boom of the 1920s, thousands of immigrant Jewish factory workers managed to build the house of their dreams, a cooperative apartment complex at the edge of Bronx Park. Then they were hit by the Great Depression. At Home in Utopia bears witness to an epic social experiment across two generations in the Coops - a place known as "little Moscow" - where people tried to change the American dream into one that included racial justice and workers' rights.
As beautiful and sleek as it is deadly, 52 Blocks merits special conservation efforts as the United States' only existing native martial culture, as it is indeed, the jazz of the martial arts world. Across the African diaspora, there are manifestations of African-derived warrior-dances, capoeira in brazil, mani in Cuba, ladja in Martinique, pinge in Haiti- yet the US offshoot has remained esoteric, because it was suppressed throughout slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow and then obscured in the criminal justice system. The history, interviews and training of the martial arts style that created Breakdance and boxing greats like Mike Tyson.
Determined to hold on to their moniker of "the Mural Kings," world-renowned artists Tats Cru produce a wall painting for Harlem's Graffiti Hall of Fame in this compelling documentary. Beginning their career as subway graffiti creators in the early 1980s, three Bronx teenagers evolved into talented muralists. Their story is told through archival clips, behind-the-scenes footage of the mural production process and interviews with the artists.