SOUTH WILLIAMSBURG — An expansive history of the neighborhood's Latino community is about to come to life.
Williamsburg-based nonprofit film company UnionDocs has successfully raised more than $30,000 via its Kickstarter campaign this week to restore a decades-old documentary, "Los Sures," that chronicled the lives of the area's Latino community, as well as to release hundreds of new mini documentaries and create an interactive history project.
The project kicked off approximately five years ago after UnionDocs got a copy of the 1984 documentary that took an in-depth look at the Williamsburg Latino community — called Los Sures — which was once one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York. The new project and interactive is called "Living Los Sures."
Inspired by the imagery and rich history of the documentary, UnionDocs decided to restore the film — directed by Diego Echeverria — and revisit the characters in it, spinning off new documentaries about them along with an interactive site following one of its subjects.
The 1984 film highlights an important alternative narrative in the history of the neighborhood, said Christopher Allen, founder and executive artistic director of UnionDocs.
"Largely the story about Williamsburg, for one reason or another, excluded the longstanding Puerto Rican population and missed the fact that this is one of the most important Latino neighborhoods in our city," Allen said.
"Los Sures is a really kind of important meeting ground."
A restored version of "Los Sures" will be screened in a theater in the fall, he said. More than 325 short documentaries inspired by the film will also be made, including a look at the modern day immigrant community in South Williamsburg.
Another online interactive will examine specific places and people featured in "Los Sures," broken down by different shots in the film.
And finally, an interactive site called "89 Steps" — which will be completed thanks to the funding — looks at South Williamsburg through the eyes of a woman named Marta, who was featured in the original film as a single mother on welfare and still lives in the neighborhood.
The project as a whole is intended to be "a set of windows to look through and to explore to get a nuanced sense of this history," Allen said.
"[It's] not this narrow single topic like gentrification or housing or race issues," Allen said. "But it's to really understand them as a matrix.
"All these different elements add up to our experience of a place, and what it is to live in the city."
Online interactives for some of the pieces will go live this month, Allen said. Follow UnionDocs to stay updated.
