7TH STREET International Documentary Competition

Josh Pais has lived on 7th Street between Avenues C and D in the East Village since he was three when his hippie mother relocated the family there.

In the nearly four-decades Pais has spent in New York’s Alphabet City, waves of settlers have passed through the neighborhood, leaving thick layers of cultural sediment behind. It is this unique and colorful character that keeps the long-term residents happy and rooted, despite the Reagan-era crime wave of muggings and murders. As the mid-1990s dawn and Mayor Guiliani begins to sanitize the area with security cameras and gentrification, Pais is compelled to pick up his own camera to make visual record of his 7th Street family, before it disappears.

7TH STREET is an engaging documentary that traces the evolution of a locale, asserting that while Hungarians, hippies and drug dealers may come and go, nothing is more harmful to a neighborhood than losing its soul.