At Home in Utopia: documentary on 1929 Brooklyn housing coop movement August 3, 2008

Interested in community building and cooperative housing? Come join me and some friends in downtown Berkeey Sunday evening to learn together about a pre-Depression domestic cooperative housing movement in New York City, with many parallels to cohousing. See how this project changed lives, and muse about how our own cooperative housing revolution will change (and maybe save?) the world.

Details/RSVP link is at East Bay Cohousing:
http://www.ebcoho.org/

"At Home in Utopia" is showing just once in Berkeley, as part of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Meet other cohousers and perhaps we can go out to coffee afterwards to discuss.

Note: doors open earlier; tickets may sell out - buy directly from the film festival website for best results. Part of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

"Workers of the world, unite" was more than a slogan to 1,200 pioneering families in cooperative Bronx apartment complexes; it symbolized a way of life — and a vital experiment that started in 1926. The 1,000 rooms of "the Coops" (rhymes with "groups") represented a dream of social equality and justice. The residents, mostly immigrant garment workers from Russia and other Eastern European countries, thrived amid greenery "like the rich" while meeting head-on the evils of poverty, anti-Semitism and racism.

At Home in Utopia, an affectionate documentary, places us in the world of parades down New York avenues by working people of all stripes fighting for workers' rights. Actress Linda Lavin narrates the story of these tough men and women who typically embraced communist, socialist and union movements from their "fortress of the working class," a place some labeled "Little Moscow." Contemporary interviews and colorful scenes of the locales seamlessly blend with archival black & white footage that portrays articulate individuals who spoke in Yiddish, Russian and English. Filmmaker Michal Goldman skillfully captures the visionary ideals that formed the United Workers Cooperative Colony, putting a human faces on a slice of history that, in one way or another, is the proud heritage of countless American Jews.
- Woody Weingarten

Co-Producer Ellen Brodsky will be at the Berkeley screening. Presented with My Olympic Summer. Co-presented by Progressive Jewish Alliance.

Details/tickets link is at East Bay Cohousing:
http://www.ebcoho.org/

Official Website: http://intentionalcomm.meetup.com/1/calendar/8447780/