Lock-Up: The Prisoners of Rikers Island
Docs Love NYC
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1h 15m
Directed by Nina Rosenblum, Jon Alpert • Documentary • 1994 • 75 minutes
If you’re arrested in New York City and can’t make bail, you’ll be sent to Rikers Island—a mammoth holding facility for 17,000 men and women awaiting trial. Jon Alpert spent ten months filming there, coming away with a graphic and unblinking documentary portrait of life inside America’s largest prison complex, including a moving look at the human faces behind the statistics. This documentary, along with Jon Alpert’s ONE YEAR IN A LIFE OF CRIME, inspired the Safdie brothers’ crime drama, GOOD TIME. LOCK UP: THE PRISONERS OF RIKERS ISLAND is a DCTV / HBO production, directed by Jon Alpert and Nina Rosenblum.
Up Next in Docs Love NYC
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Los Sures
Directed by Diego Echeverria • Documentary • 1984 • 57 minutes
Diego Echeverria’s LOS SURES probes the residents of the Southside of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, pre-gentrification. Poverty, drugs, gang violence, crime, abandoned real estate, racial
tension, single-parent homes, and inadequate local ... -
Egg Cream
Directed by Nora Claire Miller, Peter Miller & Amy Linton • Documentary • 2020 • 15 minutes
EGG CREAM is a short film about the enduring meaning of a beloved chocolate soda drink born on the Jewish Lower East Side. The egg cream contained neither eggs nor cream – it was a product of necessity an...
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Red Squad
Directed by Steven Fischler, Joel Sucher, Howard Blatt and Francis Freedland • Documentary • 1972 • 45 minutes
An investigative (but frequently humorous) documentary on the surveillance activities of the New York City Police Department's Bureau of Special Services, known as the Red Squad.
