SMALL KITCHENS (2023, 31 mins) observes the physical connections and social contrasts of kitchen work between a Nepali restaurant and a Mexican food cart on the Elmhurst-Jackson Heights border under the 7 train, in Queens. Kitchen workers participated as camera operators contributing POV footage of their labor. Initially shot in 2019, in the months prior to the coronavirus crisis, this observational tone poem is now a time-capsule of this most global part of NYC before it became the global epicenter of Covid-19 mortality. In fall 2021, I returned to these locations to shoot the film's Epilogue, edited to a performance by the jazz trio Abaré –– Ari Hoenig, Chico Pinheiro, and Eduardo Belo –– at Terraza 7 (in Elmhurst), where I previewed it in Seeing Social Globalization in Queens, a film series of my docs funded by a City Artist Corps Grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. A New Work Grant from the Queens Council on the Arts funded by NYC's Department of Cultural Affairs supported this project's initial work. You can view most of Small Kitchens' postscreening Queens Historical Society Q&A, here, discussing the work-in-progress in 2020.

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