Battle for Brooklyn: Upcoming Screening in Denver

May 17, 7pm - Denver, Colorado
DocNight at the Denver FilmCenter/Colfax 

Filmmaker Michael Galinsky and activist Daniel Goldstein talk private property, holding out, and standing ovations.

Killer Movie Reviews via PRX. by Andrea Chase
Filmmaker Michael Galinsky used the synchronicity that brought him together with Daniel Goldstein when making BATTLE FOR BROOKLYN, the story of how a private developer invoked Eminent Domain to seize private property, including Goldstein’s. The resulting film has been shortlisted for an Oscar, and at the screening I attended in San Francisco, brought an audience to its feet. When I spoke with them, the conversation covered what it was like for Goldstein to be trapped in an elevator after everyone else had moved out, how a developer can circumvent local authorities, and how the Occupy Movement has helped get the film booked around the country.

  » Listen to the Interview

‘Battle for Brooklyn’ Debuts At Artisphere

A documentary exploring eminent domain abuse in Brooklyn, N.Y., debuts at Artisphere’s Dome Theater.
Patch.com. By Brooks Hays

Some critics may claim “Battle for Brooklyn” is a slanted or biased film, but those who do will have ignored a beautiful piece of cinema and a powerful piece of journalism…

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‘Battle for Brooklyn’: It’s not just a New York story

TBD Washington, DC. By Andrew Beaujon.
(Screens in DC at Artisphere, Jan 13-15)

Battle for Brooklyn is a documentary film about the Atlantic Yards project, which attempted to parachute a new neighborhood, including a basketball arena, into downtown Brooklyn. The only problem? There was already a neighborhood there.

So why should we care about it here? You can’t swing a Twitter client in Washington without hitting some nimrod who’ll tell you New York’s got better food, better coffee, and a better arts scene. Now we have to hear about how much more cinematic their civic problems are than ours?

But: the city of Alexandria has floated the idea of using eminent domain to get its waterfront-redevelopment plan going. Maryland considered using eminent domain to keep the Preakness in Baltimore. And the District recently argued that it could strong-arm tenants out of the Skyland shopping mall whether or not the plan to replace them was viable.

Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley’s film begins with a press conference in 2003 where the famous architect Frank Gehry enthuses about the possibility to “build a whole neighborhood practically from scratch,” demonstrating a hubristic tenor that carries through the movie, as the developer Forest City Ratner steamrolls community opposition groups, city government, the courts, and not least the New York press.

Hawley says this film, which deals with eminent domain abuse, is really a critique of media. Every piece about the project, she says, “followed the same format: You quote the developer, and it was five paragraphs about what the developer was going to do, and then they’d interview Dan for one line.”

“Dan” is Daniel Goldstein, a graphic designer who quickly becomes the heart of the film. His apartment on Pacific Street was in Forest City Ratner’s cross-hairs.

“I’m not much of a patriot, but it is un-American,” Goldstein says at the beginning of the film. “Or maybe it is American. You know what? It is American. What [Ratner is] doing seems to be the American way.”

“I knew when he said that that this guy was not going anywhere,” Galinsky says. He and Hawley live in Clinton Hill, close to the proposed project, and had seen a flier opposing it. Patti Hagan answered the phone number on the flier and suggested Goldstein as an interview subject.

 As the film covers the next seven years, Goldstein’s engagement crumbles, his hair turns gray, and he becomes the only tenant in his building. He meets, marries, and has a daughter with another protester, Shabnam Merchant. And he becomes very good at talking to the media.

“You see him throughout the film discovering the talents he didn’t know he had,” says Hawley.

“He obsessed about” the project, Galinsky says of Goldstein. “For him it’s an intellectual puzzle and a conundrum.”

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San Francisco Bay Guardian Review of Battle for Brooklyn

Battle for Brooklyn  (at the Roxie Jan 13 and 19 at 7 & 9pm)

Posed as neither a left nor a right issue (though George Will does drift into view at one improbable moment), Michael Galinsky’s powerful documentary does the exhaustive, long-haul work of charting the fight between residents and business owners in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights as they oppose the condemnation of their property — oh-so-inconveniently in the way of the proposed Atlantic Yards, a mammoth Frank Gehry-designed development involving a basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets and more than a dozen skyscrapers. The scrappy residents and activists, led in part by graphic designer Daniel Goldstein, face seemingly unbeatable forces: developer Forest City Ratner, which looks to Eminent Domain to seize a community’s land, whether it likes it or not; a complicit and corrupt state and city government; and other members of a diverse, divided community who are clamoring for the jobs that Ratner’s PR machine promises.

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BATTLE FOR BROOKLYN, the Story of One Neighborhood’s Battle to Fight Big Business from Taking Their Homes, Captures the Attention of Critics and Audiences in the Heat of the Occupy Wall Street Movement

Screening at the Maysles Center in Harlem and
Brooklyn Heights Cinema in December

 ”…The pundits who continue to say they don’t understand what the protesters behind Occupy Wall Street want should look at Battle for Brooklyn, the award-winning documentary about the Atlantic Yards that was released this summer.  The film was released before the Wall Street protests began, but the story it tells is a strong summary of the crony capitalism that sparked the OWS movement.”
— Michael O’Keeffe, New York Daily News

Brooklyn, NY, November 21, 2011 – Battle for Brooklyn, co-directed by Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky and produced by David Beilinson, is a documentary about the struggle of one man, Daniel Goldstein, and his community to save their homes from from being demolished to make way for a new basketball arena as part of the largest development plan in New York City history, currently under construction in downtown Brooklyn, NY.

This intimate, rigorous and infuriating investigation of the seven-year long fight between a small neighborhood in Brooklyn and one of the largest real estate developers in the country captures the cultural zeitgeist that has people revolting against big banks in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Brooklyn filmmakers Hawley and Galinsky present an epic and universal tale of one man under pressure, and how far he will go to save his community and his home from private developers and their allies in government who want to build a basketball arena on top of it.  Along the way, he loses a fiancée, falls in love again, gets married, and starts a family. Shot over the course of eight years and compiled from almost 500 hours of footage, Battle for Brooklyn is an intimate look at the very public and passionate fight waged by one Brooklyn community to save their neighborhood from destruction and exploitation by industry giants.

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Paper of Record?

About a month ago we screened our film “Battle for Brooklyn” in Bellingham Washington.  After the film I mentioned to people that they could support the film by writing reviews on the NY Times readers review section.  At that point we had 12 powerfully positive reviews and a five star rating (based on 84 votes).  A couple of days later I checked to see if anyone had written a review.  There was a new review, but the site now said that the film had 29 ratings and a 1 star.  Obviously something was wrong.

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Wednesday, Nov 16 AND Nov 21 at 7pm: Battle for Brooklyn at Brooklyn Heights Cinema

Battle for Brooklyn is back on the big screen at the Brooklyn Heights Cinema on Wednesday, Nov 9, at 7pm.

Brooklyn Heights Cinema is at 70 Henry Street.