It's an opportune moment for Untapped New York to review Between Neighborhods, which contemplates the global and local histories of immigration and so-called modernization that orbit the Unisphere in Corona, Queens, interborough epicenter of the global coronavirus crisis.

It's become a Summer ritual, visiting Josh Glick's Global Documentary Media course at Columbia. This year it was via zoom. But I've never learned more about my own work than I did from these superb students' discussion of Between Neighborhoods and Small Kitchens. Current events, between Covid-19 and the protests George Floyd's killing generated, enhanced our conversation about documentary art, Queens, and the world, from across which these students beamed in. It was all very cool and very rewarding. (And thanks for the picture.)

My documentary about the interborough and international histories that orbit Robert Moses's Unisphere in Queens, can now be streamed via video on demand for either individual or institutional (e.g., classroom) rental. It seemed like a good time to do this, while cooped up during this Corona Crisis, which provokes thinking about immigration in Queens and the limits of modernization as Covid-19 ravages and Trump threatens the globally diverse neighborhoods around Unisphere and around Seven Local Film.

At work on a new doc that chronicles the passion of Sebastián Ospina, as the Colombia-born actor promotes and performs in NYC the one-man play he wrote about Simón Bolîvar, the Great Liberator of South America's north. The Actor in His Labyrinth expresses how Ospina's life journey –– which has traveled from Cali to NYC, from Colombian TV star to itinerant theater actor –– viscerally manifests itself in his identification with Bolívar's peripatetic life, intense loves, and inspirational aura. Stay tuned for teasers.

We preview a first-cut of our new artdoc about restaurant work on Roosevelt Avenue at Terraza 7 next month, in the neighborhood where we shot it. Check out some clips here.