New York - Twin Parks Project - TV Channel 13
1974 · 56m · Canada
Directed by Michel Régnier
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative
In 1970s New York City, a Bronx citizens' cooperative works to revive a dilapidated neighbourhood while a public television station turns its programming into an open forum on urban problems.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to canonize 70s direct cinema as this noble social document, but Régnier actually *uses* TV's access to something stranger—what if the medium itself becomes the protagonist, turning a gentrification story inside out through the machinery of public discourse?
A precisely situated work that understands its moment in both broadcast practice and urban documentary tradition; the deliberate choice to frame community struggle through the formal constraints of 1970s public television creates a meta-textual argument about who gets to speak and through what apparatus.
The decision to let the TV station's own editorial wrestling become the film's spine rather than hiding behind observational neutrality—that's what transforms what could've been standard Bronx-decay footage into something that actually interrogates how media constructs (or fails) the communities it claims to serve.