Brave New York (1912)

　　Anyone who's ever walked the streets of New York City can attest to the cultural bounty that throngs its sidewalks on a daily basis. In his ultra-v閞it?documentary BRAVE NEW YORK, photographer and filmmaker Richard Sand...展开ler (THE GODS OF TIMES SQUARE) trains his lens on the colorful characters who populate his own city neighborhood. Wandering around the East Village and the Lower East Side with camera in hand, Sandler marches up to random strangers and lets them speak their minds in refreshingly honest and unfiltered man-on-the-street interviews. Shot over a period of 12 years, Sandler's footage also captures the slow but inexorable changes that have stolen over the urban metropolis during that time, from the gentrification of formerly grubby zones like Tompkins Square Park to the bracing transformations that followed in the wake of 9/11. Simultaneously gritty and poetic, Sandler's BRAVE NEW YORK is at once a cinematic love letter to his home city, a rousing ode to democratic populism, and a mournful meditation on the unrelenting winds of change.