Gowanus Current is a documentary feature film about a neighborhood asking what is truly valuable in their community, and who gets to decide.

“Gowanus, where aromas of sewage and sulfur and burning rubber waft across streets lined with low-slung warehouses, is now at the center of a fight over the future of New York City.”

- The New York Times, April 9, 2021

A century and a half of industrial waste and raw sewage has turned Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal into one of the nation’s most toxic bodies of water. Squeezed between some of the borough’s most expensive brownstone neighborhoods, neglected public housing, row houses and small manufacturing have long dotted its sludgy banks. However, an ambitious EPA Superfund cleanup and a massive rezoning plan by the city hint that the real changes are just beginning.

Shot over the course of ten years, Gowanus Current explores the textures of this unique part of the city and the passions and hopes of stakeholders fighting for its future. The film listens in on contentious community meetings and sidewalk conversations, revisiting familiar corners over the years as warehouses come down and glass towers rise up to join the Brooklyn skyline. Ultimately, this film is a window into the conversations and convictions of the community, paired with representations of the rhythms and aesthetic of the place to create a kind of civic cinema.

Gowanus Current employs an observational approach to the people and events in the film, unmediated by interviews, narration or text, and combines it with tone poem meditations focused on texture and a sense of place. These are woven together into an evocative portrait of the community. Our goal is to employ an indirect, intuitive style to create something artful and unique.