This is an Address
2020 · 18m · United States
Directed by Sasha Wortzel
Genres: documentary, essay film, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A meditative documentary about displacement, erasure, and queer community along New York's Hudson River piers, layering trans activist Sylvia Rivera's 1995 interview — recorded as she faced eviction from the piers encampment — over footage of the dismantling of the Gansevoort Destructor Plant.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a Sylvia Rivera doc to genuflect; instead Wortzel lets the industrial demolition footage do the rhetorical work, refusing the easy emotional beat and trusting the viewer to feel the erasure through architecture rather than sentiment—it's perverse in the best way.
The layering of Rivera's archival voice against the systematic destruction of the piers creates a formal argument about institutional memory and queer temporality that feels genuinely positioned within the essay film tradition; the restraint in not over-scoring or over-explaining is curatorial precision.
The decision to keep Rivera's 1995 interview intact—uncut, unpunctuated—while the visual track documents the physical dismantling is a single structural choice that makes the whole thing breathe; it trusts the friction between what we hear and what we see to do the emotional work.
Reviews
This is an Address affirms the artist-filmmaker's interest in illuminating the ways that "the past haunts our contemporary landscape." The double entendre of the title likewise makes plain Wortzel's tributary aims; it's not just an affirmation of the piers as a community where Rivera and her peers practiced collective care in the face of discrimination, but also a loving dedication.