Film info: Foreign Parts
Film Information
Original Title | Foreign Parts |
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English Title | Foreign Parts |
Directors | Véréna Paravel J.P. Sniadecki |
Countrys | ![]() ![]() |
Year | 2010 |
Format | HD |
Colour | Color |
Duration | 80 min |
Production:
- Director: Véréna Paravel, J.P. Sniadecki
- Fotografía: Véréna Paravel, J.P. Sniadecki
- Montaje: Véréna Paravel, J.P. Sniadecki
- Producción: Véréna Paravel, J.P. Sniadecki
Synopsis
To build a new baseball stadium in Queens, a New York suburb, means to also develop Willets Point, a big and decaying part of the neighborhood. The problem is that the biggest informal auto-parts market in the city operates in that same area, where streets get cramped with every kind of car looking for spare parts. Far from being either a denounce documentary or an argument for poverty, Foreign Parts introduce us into everyday life in the area for some of its inhabitants, which include Hispanic immigrants, junkies and homeless people. In the same key as Sweetgrass –a similar film co-directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and, like Foreign Parts, also produced in the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University– there’s a twilight feel in the tone of the film, which is a sort of tribute to a doomed world. As it happens in many big cities, the people from Willets Point operate on the verge of legality, feeding the same market that evidently wants them gone: they are the crack that stabilizes the system, and there sole existence –the dignity with which they manage their very few resources– has the weight of a political stand.
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