Jewel Streets introduces viewers to a neighborhood known as The Hole, an area on the border of Brooklyn and Queens that is perpetually flooded with toxic water, exposing the community to daily health and safety hazards. With the help of local activists, residents - desperate for action after decades of city negligence - press city officials to improve the area’s infrastructure and their quality of life once and for all.
DIRECTOR STATEMENT
In Jewel Streets, a neighborhood’s flooded streets are a flagrant symbol of New York City’s disregard for the health and wellbeing of an under resourced community. Yet most New Yorkers have no idea that this is happening in their own backyard. My film explores the impact of decades-long environmental injustice and celebrates the power of community building and organizing.
My hope is that the film will put pressure on the city to update the neighborhood’s infrastructure and do so in collaboration with community residents. While it may be about a hyper local issue, my goal is to give audiences the space to reflect on the film’s universal human implications, especially as the effects of climate change exacerbate infrastructure failures all around the country.
Residents constantly call and write the city, attend community board meetings, pump water out of the streets themselves, dig makeshift drainage systems and help get each other's cars out of blocks of ice in winter. I wanted audiences to see that residents are far from passive victims. The green screens were a way for community members who have been particularly active in organizing to visually represent their dreams for the neighborhood’s future and engage city officials anew.
— Sarah Jacobson
TEAM
Sarah Jacobson
Director & Editor
Sarah Jacobson is a Brooklyn-based documentary director and editor. Ranging from Vimeo Staff Pick shorts to the Emmy Award-winning feature, We Could Be King (Tribeca 2014), she has worked on projects that have screened internationally and across the US at festivals such as SXSW, Full Frame, and BAMCinemaFest. In recent years, she co-edited the feature documentaries Us Kids (Sundance 2020) and Embodied (Tribeca X 2023), and worked as an associate editor on the feature documentary CUSP (Sundance 2021). In addition to her editing work, she co-directed Have No Fear (Visions du Réel, 2017) which follows activist and choreographer Adia Whitaker as she teaches her children how to avoid becoming victims of police brutality through performance.
Jenny Catherall
Producer
Jenny Catherall is a Brooklyn-based producer and director. She’s currently an Executive Producer at People’s Television, where she directs and produces work for a range of clients including Meta and TED, and supports the executive team on independent documentary projects. Prior to that, she was a freelance producer and editor and worked extensively with clients such as Instagram, The New York Times, and MTV News, creating multi-platform original content. Jenny also directed and produced Big Party on the Other Side, an award-winning short documentary. She was a 2015/16 CoLAB fellow at UnionDocs, a Multimedia Producer at Human Rights Watch, and received her B.A. in Religious Studies from NYU.
CREDITS
Director
Sarah Jacobson
Featuring
Mohammed Doha
Mohammed Islam
David Lopez
Julisa & the Rodriguez family
Rahima Khatun
Producer
Jenny Catherall
Editor
Sarah Jacobson
Cinematography
Nate Dorr, Sean Hanley
Sound Design & Re-Recording Mix
M.B. Al-Rahim
Colorist
Sean Hanley
VFX
Colleen Foley
GET IN TOUCH
Interested in our film? Contact us for opportunities to screen, distribute, or feature it at your festival.
Jenny Catherall
Producer
jenny.catherall@gmail.com
+1 (678) 642 7686