“Looking at Los Sures” Director Diego Echeverria and UnionDocs artists in person

Experiments in Place and Collaborative Documentary: UnionDocs’ Looking at Los Sures Director Diego Echeverria and UnionDocs artists will be in person Tuesday, Oct. 18, 7 p.m. at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, room B-04, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge.

In the late seventies and early eighties, South Williamsburg was one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City. Largely Puerto Rican and Dominican, it was troubled by drugs and violence, full of abandoned real estate, and badly under-served. Los Sures, a documentary from 1984 by Diego Echeverria, skillfully represents the challenges of this time, while also celebrating a community that was connected, coherent, and full of culture.

UnionDocs, a Center for Documentary Art based in South Williamsburg, has begun an investigation of the neighborhood that revisits Echeverria’s film and creates a constellation of companion documentary projects that update, annotate, challenge, and spiral off from the original. The result will be Looking at Los Sures, an interactive, multilayer online documentary project that seeks not just to extract important stories from the place, but to also create new shared histories, to deeply enhance local awareness, respect, and tolerance, and to facilitate relationships between neighbors.

For this special event, Echeverria will be present to discuss his original film and respond to the contemporary work of UnionDocs. The program will include excerpts from the original and work from last year’s UnionDocs Collaborative Fellows.

This screening and talk is presented by the Film Study Center with metaLAB (at) Harvard and is free and open to the public.