Central Skagit Library District

The name "Kitty Genovese" became synonymous with urban apathy after The New York Times printed an article stating that she was stabbed to death during an attack that lasted more than half an hour, while 38 witnesses did nothing. Fifty years later, her brother uncovers a lie that transformed his life, condemned a city, and defined an era.

In fall 2006, former DJ, point guard and teacher turned first-time principal, James O'Brien, opened a small public high school in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where 1/3 of residents live below the poverty line and the graduation rate is 40%. With infectious optimism, O'Brien and his team of eight undertook an unconventional approach and ambitious mission: Create a school with an arts-oriented curriculum that also emphasizes self-development, community...

Brooklyn Matters reveals how a few powerful men tried to tilt the Brooklyn landscape in favor of big real estate at the expense of urban livability. Disregarding time-honored urban planning principles and manipulating a desperate need in the African-American community for jobs and affordable housing, they pushed their own interests forward--luxury housing and a 20,000 seat sports arena. The film poses vital, timely questions that are relevant to cities...

The Central Park five, a new film from award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns, tells the story of the five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem who were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in New York City's Central Park in 1989. The film chronicles The Central Park Jogger case, for the first time from the perspective of these five teenagers whose lives were upended by this miscarriage of justice.

Legendary radio personality Bob Fass revolutionized the FM airwaves in the 1960s and '70s with his free-form program Radio unnameable, a cultural hub for music, politics, and audience engagement. For nearly 50 years, he has been heard at midnight on New York City listener-sponsored station WBAI, utilizing the airwaves for mobilization long before today's innovations in social media. Drawing from Fass's extraordinary personal archive of audio recordings,...

Newly arrived to New York City and deserted by her husband Gabriel, Mariana must find a way, in a strange city where she barely speaks the language, to provide for her family, financially and emotionally.

A favorite of the film festival circuit, The Aggressives is an insightful look at the little explored, yet highly dramatic subculture of lesbian women who identify as men. This fascinating documentary features intimate and revealing interviews with six aggressive women. The Aggressives range in masculinity but do not aspire to be men. Nor are they "drag kings." They have found an unexplored loophole in society's gender tapestry and this film seeks...

A home of one's own: that's the American dream. But what happens when the dreamers are immigrants, factory workers, and Communists? In the mid-1920s, thousands of Jewish immigrant garment workers managed to catapult themselves out of urban slums and ghettos by pooling their resources and building four cooperatively owned and run apartment complexes in the Bronx. They believed that owning one's home went a long way toward controlling one's fate. At...

Through the eyes of funeral director Isaiah Owens, the beauty and grace of African American funerals are brought to life. Filmed at the Owens Funeral Home in Harlem and the rural South, director Christine Turner's Homegoings takes an up-close look at the rarely seen world of undertaking in the black community, where funeral rites draw on a rich palette of tradition, history and celebration. It reveals the special status of undertakers in the community;...

Anthropological in scope, sensuous in detail and emotionally resonant throughout, Foreign parts is an exemplary social record of Willets Point, an industrial graveyard of scrap heaps and auto shops in Queens, New York, that is scheduled to be demolished and redeveloped. Filled with scrapyards and auto salvage shops, lacking sidewalks or sewage lines, the area seems ripe for urban development. But Foreign parts discovers a strange community where wrecks,...