Third Annual Preservation Film Festival Showcases Films About the City Across the Five Boroughs

Brooklyn bloggers will be among the participants in a city-wide film festival focused on themes such as preservation, development, planning and the history of neighborhoods.

Running through May 3, the New York Preservation Archive Project’s third annual Preservation Film Festival showcases documentaries and classic films at venues across the five boroughs.

On April 15, there will be a screening of “Battle for Brooklyn,” the 2011 documentary about the fight around the Atlantic Yards mega-development (now called Pacific Park). Bloggers Norman Oder and Katia Kelly, along with one of the filmmakers, will be participating in a Q&A after the screening, which takes place at the Alamo Drafthouse in Downtown Brooklyn.

Morris Engel’s landmark 1953 film “Little Fugitive” will screen on April 20 at the Coney Island Museum, not far from where a majority of the movie takes place.

Elsewhere, there will be a discussion on April 24 at The J.M. Kaplan Fund in Manhattan about urbanist William “Holly” Whyte, led by Phil Myrick, CEO of Project for Public Spaces. The event will also feature clips from Whyte’s 1980 film, “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.”

And on April 29, there will be a screening of the documentary “At Home in Utopia,” about the United Workers Cooperative Colony, an early and important co-op complex. The screening takes place at the nonprofit gallery BronxArtSpace.

Photographer, blogger and filmmaker Nathan Kensinger and other panelists will look at preservation and climate change after the April 27 showing at the National Lighthouse Museum of “Managed Retreat,” about Staten Island neighborhoods selected to be razed after Hurricane Sandy.

Tickets for some of the events are $5 and require an RSVP. For more information on the festival or specific screenings, including times and venue locations, click here.

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