Image Courtesy of unmappable productions
Open Arts faculty member Diane Hodson has received a grant from the Graham Foundation for a new documentary project called Million Dollar Block. Hodson is working on the film with her fellow director Jasmine Luoma; the two have produced award-winning documentaries in the past, includinng 2015's unmappable. From release:
"Million Dollar Block is a feature documentary that peers into the life of tenants in one block of public housing in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Confined to the Van Dyke Houses, the film creates a multilayered visual and aural representation of how city and state institutions affect residents and modify their perceptions of the world. With the changing landscape of Van Dyke as the backdrop, the film builds on the Justice Mapping Project’s "million-dollar blocks" by exploring the human underpinnings of crime in the context of public housing. Whether it be waiting for maintenance to make an outstanding repair, waiting for developers to break ground on the “affordable housing” development rising within the block’s borders, or waiting for their son’s unsolved murder to be solved, the residents of the Van Dyke Houses subsist in an institutional purgatory."
Diane Hodson teaches Fundamentals of Filmmaking I in the Open Arts program. You can find her website here, and Jasmine Luoma's here.