ILLUMINATE. CHALLENGE. INSPIRE.
Cooperative living in complicated times.
They wanted to change the American dream. In the mid-1920s, thousands of immigrant Jewish garment workers managed to catapult themselves out of urban slums and ghettos by pooling their resources and building four cooperatively owned and run apartment complexes in the Bronx. They believed that owning one's home went a long way toward controlling one's fate. "At Home in Utopia" focuses on the United Workers Cooperative Colony, aka the Coops, the most grass-roots and member-driven of the Jewish labor housing cooperatives, where many of the residents were Communists. Almost as soon as they moved in to their new buildings, they were hit by the Great Depression. The garment industry was hit hard; they were unemployed; and they could no longer pay their mortgage. They believed they were watching the death of capitalism. And in its death throes, they saw opportunity: they would change America. In the 1930s, while they were demonstrating against mortgage foreclosures and for unemployment insurance, they opted to racially integrate their own cooperative house. An epic tale of the struggle for equity and justice over two generations, the film tracks the rise and fall of one community from the 1920s into the 1950s, paying close attention to the passions that bound them together and those that tore them apart. Along the way, "At Home in Utopia" bears witness to lives lived with courage across the barriers of race, language, and sometimes even common sense. History may not repeat itself, but given the current economic crisis and the recent presidential election, the story of the Coops has powerful echoes today.
'At Home in Utopia' tells the inspiring story of workers who dared to transform a small piece of the Bronx into a working-class utopia. This beautiful film not only recovers a nearly forgotten radical workers' community and a culture of collective ownership, but it reminds us what is possible when we organize.
Robin D. G. Kelley, author of "Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination"
Michal Goldman's hourlong documentary 'At Home in Utopia' is a narrow but rich core-sample of 20th century history. The story of 'the Coops,' a Bronx housing project built and owned by immigrant Jewish workers, the film also charts the long, strange journey of American left-wing political idealism before and after World War II. At times the mixture of courage and naivete is enough to break your heart.
Ty Burr
The Boston Globe
This is a fascinating film about the importance of one special place that historians, union organizers, civil rights activists, and community organizers must see.
Dolores Hayden,
Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies, Yale University
full review
'At Home in Utopia' brings back to life a lost world of American radicalism. Through the history of a cooperative housing project founded by New York Jewish communists, it reconstructs two generations of political activists who sought not only to build a new society but to live out their ideals then and there. Sympathetic but clear-eyed, it shows a side of the American past most people have no idea ever existed.
Joshua B. Freeman
Professor of History; Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York
Today's furious debates over the housing market, the scope of the financial panic which is upon us, the role of the government in our economic life, and the agency of the human spirit in the face of calamity make the Goldman/Brodsky effort especially
relevant--and especially satisfying.
Jeff Crosby
President, North Shore Labor Council, Lynn, MA
President, IUECWA Local 201
full review
Visit the official website for At Home In Utopia
Appropriate for: High School College/University
Special Features:
Closed captions of main feature; Director's Commentary; 75+ minutes of added material in 5 bonus scenes: "The Amalgamated Houses" "Coops Memories" "Patriotism in the Coops" "Reds versus Pinks" "Storyteller Updates"
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