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June 8, 2011
Battle for Brooklyn
The Leonard Lopate Show [WNYC Radio]
Thursday, June 09, 2011
Filmmakers Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky, talk about their documentary “Battle for Brooklyn.” It’s an intimate look at the very public and passionate fight waged by residents and business owners of Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights neighborhood facing condemnation of their property to make way for Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project—16 skyscrapers and a basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets. “Battle for Brooklyn” has its theatrical premiere in New York City on June 17; it opens this year’s Brooklyn Film Festival on June 3; and will screen in the Rooftop Films summer series on June 9 in Fort Greene Park.
Related coverage...
The Sports ITeam Blog [NYDailyNews.com], Blogger Oder reviews Atlantic Yards doc
Atlantic Yards Report blogger Norman Oder knows more than anybody about Bruce Ratner's plans to build a massive real estate project in Brooklyn that includes an arena for the NBA's Nets, so I was eager to hear what he thought about "Battle for Brooklyn," the AY documentary that made its U.S. premiere at the Brooklyn Film Festival on Friday.
Here's the nut graf of a review Oder wrote for Dissent:
"Having observed much of the story in real time, I found 'Battle' most valuable in the camera's witness to the palpable insincerity and cold-blooded indifference of the developer-government alliance. Though Atlantic Yards may not directly evoke the Robert Moses era, when massive numbers of people in New York City were displaced by large public projects, the film shows that the powers today are less blatant but still relentless. 'Battle' pays off with riveting crosscut scenes on the day of the ceremonial arena groundbreaking, March 10, 2010. Goldstein tells an interviewer, 'We should not be celebrating it today, we should be investigating it today.'"
Scene Magazine, New Film Documents Activists’ Fight with Forest City Over Atlantic Yards
Cleveland’s history is hog-tied to a number of companies, but one in particular has shaped and re-shaped the region over the course of the last century, a company that appropriately takes its corporate moniker from the 216’s shorthand: Forest City Enterprises.
Long-steered by the Ratner family, the company, which started out as a local lumber yard, is now global real estate player. But one branch of the corporate tree has been front and center in recent years: Forest City Ratner Companies, Bruce Ratner’s NYC real estate firm. This outfit is behind the Jay-Z-fronted, Bloomberg-backed, Russian billionaire-greased Atlantic Yards project, a massive facelift of downtown Brooklyn that includes the Net’s new home, the Barclay Center.
But despite the official narrative, the sailing hasn’t been smooth. The Brooklyn community fought a near-decade against the project, a righteous NIMBY struggle the size of Normandy. The quixotic push from community activist against Forest City and New York politicos was ready-made for the movies, and a new documentary on the struggle has recently been released, “Battle for Brooklyn.”
Posted by eric at June 8, 2011 7:41 AM