In Jackson Heights

In the course of his brilliant career, Frederick Wiseman has tackled both great social institutions (a prison for the criminally insane, high school, military, police, juvenile court, the welfare system) and cultural ones (La Comédie-Française, the Paris Opéra Ballet, American Ballet Theater, London’s National Gallery). Here he profiles a community, Jackson Heights, one of New York’s most diverse neighborhoods where 167 different languages are spoken, with immigrants from Peru, Colombia, Mexico, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan—as well as elderly residents of Jewish, Irish, and Italian extraction.

Under the elevated train, a hodgepodge of stores sell whole baby goats, saris, and Bollywood DVDs; they offer HIV testing, Tibetan food, and classes for would-be cabbies. Jackson Heights is home to an activist LGBT community, to recent survivors of terrifying border crossings, students of the Quran, and small shop-owners who mobilize against the Williamsburg-isation of the neighborhood. Wiseman embraces a community that revels in still being affordable, twenty minutes from “the city,” and resolutely unhip.

This film is part of FREDERICK WISEMAN: LOOKING FOR CONNECTION, in which ten films by the American master of documentary form the backbone of a programme about communities and third spaces.