Alamo Drafthouse Announces Making Rent in Bed-Stuy Film Screening Series

Amid constant talks on gentrification, Alamo Drafthouse Brooklyn has announced the new Making Rent in Bed-Stuy series, powered by critic, filmmaker, and programmer Brandon Harris.

The film series, running from June 12th through 21st, marks the release of Harris’ forthcoming debut book of the same title, “Making Rent in Bed-Stuy: A Memoir of Trying to Make it in New York City.” Harris has curated four iconic films that take place in or near one of the most famous and now rapidly changing central Brooklyn neighborhood. The classic films include works from notables like Spike Lee and Hal Ashby, in addition to the debut features from directors Ryan Fleck, Anna Boden, and Shaka King.

The series kicks off June 12th with a screening of The Landlord, one of the earliest films to chronicle Brooklyn gentrification, and concludes on June 21st with Shaka King’s melancholic comedy Newlyweeds, chronicling a newly married couple lost in the marijuana cloud hanging over their relationship. Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s debut Half Nelson will screen on June 19th, starring a younger Ryan Gosling in a star making turn as an elementary school teacher grappling with addiction. Perhaps the most iconic Bed-Stuy film of all time, Spike Lee’s masterpiece Do The Right Thing screens on June 13th, starring Lee himself and remaining just as essential today as it was in 1989.

Tickets for all screenings are on sale May 22 and can be purchased via the Alamo Drafthouse website.

See below the series full line-up, with descriptions by Brandon Harris:

June 12 – THE LANDLORD (1970)

Having decamped from the opulence of his parents’ leafy Connecticut mansion for a Park Slope walk-up in what his brother-in-law refers to as a “Colored Neighborhood”, Beau Bridges’s Elgar Enders is one of the New Hollywood’s most enduring screen figures. Hal Ashby’s remarkable debut feature, one of earliest filmic documents of Brooklyn gentrification, marks the beginning of a handful of monumental motion picture careers, including those of Gordon Willis, Lou Gossett Jr. and Bill Gunn.

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June 13 – DO THE RIGHT THING (1989)

Spike Lee’s masterpiece, made twenty-nine summers ago on a Bedford-Stuyvesant block that was seen as a microcosm for a troubled New York as a whole, serves as a literal melting pot on the year’s hottest day. Tackling the most salient themes of American Cinema-ambition and urban survival, economics and race relations, the relationship between violence and liberty-on a scale both intimate and grand, DO THE RIGHT THING has lost little of its power over the years. With its bold candor and Brechtian distancing devices, high melodrama and comedic farce, it remains the most enduring work in Lee’s remarkable if at times perplexing oeuvre.

June 19 – HALF NELSON (2006)

The movie that kinda sorta made Ryan Gosling a movie star and certainly made him an Oscar nominee, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s debut feature finds him as an elementary school teacher and girls’ basketball coach who gets caught by one of his players (the remarkable Shareeka Epps) getting high in his team’s locker room. What follows is a story about an unlikely friendship that examines guilt, addiction and instability powered as much by the startlingly effective lead performances as it is by the lovely verisimilitude of Andrij Parekh’s shooting and a score by Broken Social Scene.

June 21 – NEWLYWEEDS (2013)

In this winning, tonally nimble comedy, Lovers Lyle (Amari Cheatom), a repo man for a rent-to-own electronics and appliance store, and Nina (Trae Harris), a museum tour guide, are both frequently stoned as they fail to examine how their relationship is governed by gandja. Proceeding with their chemic romance until the law’s dark hand descends on both of them for blunders that bespeak the consequence of pot on otherwise nimble minds, the film inhabits a colorful and humorous contemporary Bedford-Stuyvesant that contains more than its fair share of melancholy.