Raw Anger Permeates a New Film About Gentrification in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

There is nothing subtle about Gut Renovation, Su Friedrich’s new documentary on the gentrification of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which opens today at New York’s Film Forum. She's pissed, and she wants you to know it.

This is a personal story for the award-winning independent filmmaker, who moved to the neighborhood in 1989 and was eventually pushed out when the authorities decided that, after 19 years, they were finally going to start enforcing building codes in the old Hecla Iron Works factory. She had been living there with a rotating assortment of roommates, most of them fellow artists, for most of her adult life. But with zoning changes and residential redevelopment of the entire area, it was only a matter of time before they got the boot, and she knew it. So she started documenting what she saw happening to the streets around her.