Jackson Heights Life

The final evening of this series, its Program C @6:30PM,  features a doc I shot in 2019 and that previewed at the end of that year, at Terraza 7.  Small Kitchens (28 mins. 2020 sevenlocalfilm.com) connects and contrasts work and food between a Mexican cart and a Nepali restaurant both owned by immigrant women under the 7 train.  It's an observational tone poem that intercuts multicam footage, including POV shots from cameras operated by workers, across an entire day and night along Jackson Heights-Elmhurst border.  It's also now a time-capsule of life here just before Covid Time.  It inadvertently captures some of the social context for why, and how, and towards whom the coronavirus was so particularly deadly here. During the pandemic, I took advantage of the pause in many other things to undertake much needed postproduction work on the 2019 footage. More recently, in preparation for this series, I produced a 2021 Epilogue that returns to these Small Kitchens to think about their resilience and that of the communities that constitute our area; it also contemplates the place of Terraza 7 in out community through the Pandemic.  An amazing recent Terraza 7 performance Ari Hoenig, Chico Pinheiro, and Eduardo Belo – who are the jazz trio Abare - generously contribute the soundtrack and appear in the Epilogue as well; their interpretation of Dizzy Gillespie's "Woody 'n You" is really the script to which I edited.  You can check out more about this evening and the others in this series at https://terraza7.com/event/small-kitchens-film-screening-filmmaker-seth-fein-qa/

This series is free thanks to a #CityArtistCorps Grant from the New York Foundation of the Arts, the NYC Dept of Cultural Affairs, the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment, and the Queens Theatre.

Small Kitchens received support from a 2019 New Work Grant from the Queens Council on the Arts.