« Brooklyn Film Festival, Rooftop Films Announce Premiere of Battle for Brooklyn | Main | Can manufacturing thrive in the city? New Pratt/Brookings report offers strategies »
May 8, 2011
hotdocs 2011 part i
Steve Munro
Battle for Brooklyn ****
Directed by Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley, USA
Living in a city whose government was recently taken over by politicians whose recipe for success is to sell everything in sight, I just had to see Battle for Brooklyn. This film follows a 7-year battle by residents and businesses against redevelopment to make way for a new basketball stadium and many, many condos.
...
The pattern here is distressingly familiar: a sports complex, a team of dubious value, a developer who needs government help to achieve his goals, governments that are more interested in money and good news than in preserving neighbourhoods. The legal and political issue at the heart of the story is the abuse of powers of “eminent domain”, or as they are known in Canada, “expropriation”. If the state uses its power to force the sale of land for any purpose, then no neighbourhood is safe from intervention on behalf of a developer whose project is deemed “a public good”, and the opportunities for corruption are obvious.
...
Battle for Brooklyn is a cautionary tale about the results of government and private interests conspiring together against the public. This film, at a neighbourhood scale, is a fitting complement to Hot Coffee (on the systematic limitation of corporate liability) which I saw later in the festival.
Posted by steve at May 8, 2011 1:21 AM