Docs for Sale producer Stella Bronwasser went to bed on November 24 and woke up next morning to a Facebook timeline jam-packed with congratulatory notices, after her film won best prize at the local Williamsburg Independent Film Festival.
“It was a pretty good wake-up call,” she admits.
In The film Requiem for Williamsburg, directed by Yara Hannema, Paulien, a Dutch artist and divorced mother moves to the crime-ridden NY district of Williamsburg. All she can afford is a broken down pile but against the odds she manages to renovate it, eventually opening the soon to be famous Holland Tunnel Gallery in her garden. But at the turn of the millennium gentrification kicks in, something which has a profound effect on the character of neighbourhood. Eventually, Paulien must decide upon a future course of action…
“I used to live in Paulien’s house,” says Bronwasser. “That’s how I found her. She’s an artist, an artist in her own residence. We became friends and I started to follow her, and I started to follow the changes in Williamsburg. That was when I decided to make a film and to find a director.”
Bronwasser argues that the heart of the film is not so much the dilemma of whether or not to move away, rather Paulien’s abundance of resilience. “What the documentary shows is that whenever she hits a wall she will find a way to get over it or bypass it… She says ‘ok, ok, I’m going to swallow this, I am going to start all over’, and she is 76 now, so that is really about her character.”
The 30-minute film is part self-financed and part crowd-funded. “I wanted to get the story out before anything happens to her and I thought if we do this lean and mean then we can do it.”
