A combined documentary and narrative exploring Times Square/42nd St. as an epicenter of both the American Dream and its failures, using footage shot from the 1980s to the present to reveal a city’s lost personal history.

A visual essay about city life, built from over five years of street footage from New York City, and inspired by the filmmaker’s job as a pushcart vendor.

Jem Cohen is a New York-based filmmaker who mixes documentary, narrative, and experimental genres, often building from his own ongoing archive of street footage, portraits and sound. His works have screened at festivals including Berlin, Rotterdam and Vancouver, and have won prizes at Locarno, Festival Dei Popoli and the Full Frame Documentary Festival, among others. The feature, Chain, won a 2005 Independent Spirit Award. Cohen’s films are in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney, and have shown at venues including the Whitney Biennial and London’s ICA. He has received a number of grants and other honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital grant, the Alpert Award in the Arts, and residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony.