93 Minutes 2011
Battle for Brooklyn is about eminent domain abuse and the development of a professional basketball arena in Brooklyn. Widely known as the Atlantic Yards project, the undertaking was a major source of contention between the government, property owners, and private developers as local residents resisted a billionaire developer’s attempt to use eminent domain to seize their homes and businesses.
FEATURING: Daniel Goldstein, Shabnam Merchant, Bruce Ratner, Patti Hagan, Norman Siegel, Marty Markowitz, Jay-Z, Letitia James, Michael Bloomberg
“The movie has heart, soul and chutzpah. The time line that drives Battle for Brooklyn makes it as urgent as any Hollywood thriller. Four stars.” -NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
“A love story. A compelling tale about the value of individual and collective resistance.” -SALON
“Remarkable. Nothing depicts the borough’s backbone with more personality and urgency than Battle for Brooklyn.” -THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
BATTLE FOR BROOKLYN follows the story of reluctant activist Daniel Goldstein as he struggles to save his home and community from being demolished to make way for a professional basketball arena and the densest real estate development in U.S. history. Along the way, he falls in love, gets married and starts a family while living in a vacated building located at the heart of the project site. Over the course of seven years, Daniel spearheads the movement against the development plan as he and the community fight tenaciously in the courts, the streets, and the media to stop the abuse of eminent domain and reveal the corruption at the heart of the plan.
“Battle for Brooklyn” has been used in countless classes to teach about grassroots/government interaction. Many communities use it to prepare for a government assault on their neighborhoods. While the film was sometimes faulted for being too “in the camp” of those fighting the project, it was also a powerful corrective to the narrative that was shaped by the developer’s very expensive public relations campaign. The developer and the government painted the project as necessary for “revitalizing” a downtrodden neighborhood. However, the truth was much more complex. History is often written by the winners, and in this case, the developer won the rights to the land via eminent domain. However, “Battle for Brooklyn” challenged that narrative to a profound degree and helped change the story.
In our nearly 6 years of working on a film about the Atlantic Yards project, we have taken great pains to avoid using our work to influence the situation. While we are not activist filmmakers, we are also not journalists and it has has not been our goal to cover the story from a “news” perspective. Instead, we see ourselves......
Battle for Brooklyn airs on TV in Australia next week and should be hitting the US airwaves this fall. It’s been over a year since the film was first run on screen and as such it’s a good time to write an update about where things stand with the Atlantic Yards project and the film. After launching it at Hot......
About a year and a half ago – when we launched our first kickstarter campaign to help fund Battle for Brooklyn (a doc we have been working on for 7.5 years), I did a great deal of planning. I took the game theory aspect very seriously. We knew that we had networks of people that we could tap into, and......
The following is the second part of a discussion begun yesterday in regards to context and how information flows through the world in the age of blogs. We have been shooting our film for 6 years now, focusing mainly on an individual who refused to sell his home to make way for the arena project because he felt that it......
When I hit the floor with searing back pain for the second time in my life I was stuck on my office floor for two weeks, unable to even sit up. On the 9th or 10th day of my stuckness I tried to go to the airport to get on a plane with my family. It took every bit of......
In 2004, when we set out to make a film about Dr. Sarno, we couldn’t have envisioned the movie that it has become. Over the last 10 years there has been a dramatic shift in the level of acceptance of the mind body connection in terms of health care. When we started trying to talk about the connection between emotions......
Last week a good friend, and academy nominated doc director, gave us some great notes on our rough cut. He had seen a somewhat earlier version of the film so it was great to hear his notes because we had already addressed about 80% of them. At the same time, he asked a series of sharp questions about what we......
When I lived in New York, I documented a lot of protests. Over the past 15 years I have seen a steady increase in the militarization of the police. The current protests against the grand jury decisions not to prosecute cops for killing unarmed black men are an extension of the anger that was expressed during Occupy. Doubling down on......
About 10 years ago, after making several narrative feature films, we decided to give documentary filmmaking a try. Now we’re pretty sick of documentary filmmaking and want to jump back into narrative. Through the making of Donor 67, we met Alana Sveta. We are currently working with her on the script called “Adam and Eva”. In the meantime we are......
We've been doing this work for over 25 years and have made all kinds of films from rock and roll narratives to crime films to political and personal documentaries. On the surface, most of the films don't seem connected, but certain themes run through them all, and they build on one another. These can be thought of as themes and also as lessons we learned from making the films. ...
This morning as I sat down to work on a different post, I noticed that a blog about marriage issues linked to the Donor 67 blog without comment. I took a quick look and noticed that the driving sentiment behind the site was the idea of protecting the sanctity of marriage. While I have become increasing “conservative” as I have......
At Rumur we tend to make films that focus on people who go against the grain of the system. As we have matured, our characters have matured, but they are still outsiders who have difficulty going with the flow when the flow is going in a different direction than they think it should. Our very first film, “Half-Cocked” (1993), isn’t......