“I Was Shocked To Be the Only Person There with a Camera”: Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg on their Tribeca-Debuting Doc about Industry City Development, Emergent City

From Elizabeth Nichols’s Flying Lessons, to Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s Union, to now Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg’s Emergent City (likewise EP’d by Stephen Maing), corporate takeovers of NYC and the inherent Gotham vs. Goliath battles they spawn seem to be in the documentary air this year. And while Flying Lessons and Union clearly cast entities like corrupt Croman Real Estate and anti-labor Amazon as the respective baddies, Emergent City is surprisingly not much interested in blaming Jamestown Properties, the conglomerate behind Industry City, the largest privately owned industrial property in New York, for the rapid gentrification of the Sunset Park neighborhood the longtime Brooklyn filmmakers call home. Indeed, the veteran duo prefer to play the fly-on-the-wall long game, over a decade actually, patiently turning their lens every which way, from the aforementioned developers of IC, to the area’s long-established Latino and Chinese communities, to the caught-in-the-middle council members, as each side publicly makes its case for the future of the Brooklyn waterfront. And by extension, the rest of NYC as well. A week before the film’s June 11th Tribeca premiere, Filmmaker reached out to Anderson, who’s been documenting gentrification in the borough since 2012’s My Brooklyn, and Sterrenberg, whose arts collective and production cooperative Meerkat Media is based in Sunset Park, to learn all about Emergent City and being part of the “creative class” Industry City caters to.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.