The Battle of Sunset Park

Sunset Park in Brooklyn is suffering. Nearly 20% of its population lives in poverty, rents are steadily rising and the neighborhood’s would-be saviors — private developers promising to transform its abandoned warehouses into thriving businesses — have proven to be wolves in sheep’s clothing. “Emergent City,” directed by Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg, follows the step-by-step process of rezoning that allows for such an outcome as well as the community opposition to it.

The movie captures local, street-level democracy in action. As concerned residents and climate justice groups demand more rigorous scrutiny of the developers’ plans, well-meaning politicians are caught between constituencies and forced to balance the competing pressures of public and private interests. A drawn-out local zoning war may seem like cinematically dry ground, but Anderson and Sterrenberg take an elliptical visual approach that invigorates their tale of bureaucratic process, bringing Sunset Park to life as a lengthy series of establishing shots across its 99 minutes. The filmmakers use techniques normally meant to transition between scenes, but they hold on these shots instead of cutting away, turning them into a central focus.  

We’ve seen Anderson and Sterrenberg’s preferred mode of establishing connective tissue in film and TV before — the apartment buildings on “Seinfeld,” a Chris Nolan skyline, the maps in “Indiana Jones” — but “Emergent City” employs them as the lingua franca, building an entire story out of intermediate moments. This frames Sunset Park as a liminal space in a constant state of physical (and metaphysical) change, while also ensuring that the neighborhood remains a primary character. Even when the movie focuses on speeches and conversations, its human beings are often framed closer to the corners of the screen or as fixtures of the background and foreground in wider group shots, as though they were part and parcel of the environment. In the movie’s purview, Sunset Park and its residents are up against the specter of change and uncertainty, trapped in a constant state of transition with little recourse. The film presents them through a temporal prism, never quite specifying exactly when each town hall or public debate takes place — which yields a constant state of present-ness, as though everything were unfolding urgently, in the now. 

“Emergent City” conveys the neighborhood’s historical backstory, as a once-prominent pier, through deft use of archival footage and contemporary video clips. But it ensures they always support the film’s emotional focus: the people. From Chinese and Hispanic immigrants (documented or otherwise), to residents who have lived there for generations, everyone gets a say in the various political forums. However, they rarely speak in the usual documentarian manner of traditional talking-head interviews. When the film isn’t capturing their public meetings from a fly-on-the-wall perspective, it opts for footage of these Brooklynites going about their daily lives. One scene of elderly Chinese residents gathering in a park to practice dance is particularly gentle. This streamlined depiction of what’s at stake — living a life of normalcy, unburdened by financial hardship — is more potent than anything the movie’s subjects could likely express to the camera in a sanitized studio setting.   

These are not artistic decisions that Anderson and Sterrenberg come to lightly. As people straddling the line between outsider and longstanding community member, their perspectives mirror the political and aesthetic tensions inherent to a film like “Emergent City,” which seeks to subvert cinematic tropes to emphasize the importance of people and spaces that feel familiar. It achieves this by alchemizing well-worn modes and techniques, transforming them in the process. Now-common verhead drone shots of streets and buildings are adorned with digital borders and labels, as though “Emergent City” were forcing various maps and 2D representations of the neighborhood — the kind used by corporate vultures to make financial decisions — to take living, breathing, three-dimensional form. 

The auditory approach also manages to humanize scenes of steel and concrete. Rather than music, “Emergent City” is scored by the ambient noise and chatter of the neighborhood, notably with repeated use of “L” and “J” cuts — transitional techniques in which audio from a prior scene bleeds into the next one (or vice versa) to bring us further into the story. Anderson and Sterrenberg deploy these cuts between both scenes and within them, granting the film a sense of constant momentum and turning political debates into an acoustic fabric that serves the flow of the images, rather than the logic of conversations.

The result feels novel in the realm of the political documentary: a stream-of-consciousness presentation that blurs the lines between journalism and mood-piece, between past and present, and between theoretical and tangible. Harmful resolutions passed decades ago are shown to haunt more contemporary decisions and developments, but the film’s lack of defined timeline beyond “recently” — its refusal to specify exactly when events unfold in relation to one another — yields a powerful and poetic chronicle of how the residents of Sunset Park have been fighting the same fight for recognition and dignity against the same malignant economic forces for far too long.