SMART Cinema presents

Film Captured & Symposium: is Amsterdam captured between metropolitan ambitions and the fringe?

Programme
Film Premiere: 15.00 – 16.30 hrs
Symposium: 17.00 – 19.00 hrs

Guests speakers:
Daniel Levin and Ben Solomon (Directors of the film Captured)
Carolien Gehrels (Amsterdam Alderman for Culture)
Cyrus Frisch (Amsterdam film director, renowned for Vergeef me and Oogverblindend)
Maarten Hajer (Director bureau for the urban environment)
Rene Boomkens (Professor Social and Cultural Philosophy)
Moderated by Xandra Schutte (Editor-in-Chief, De Groene Amsterdammer)
After the Dutch premiere of the film Captured – about the gentrification of the Lower East Side in New York – there will be a debate about the changing character of the city of Amsterdam

Since 1979 Clayton Patterson has dedicated his life to documenting the final era of raw creativity and lawlessness in New York City’s Lower East Side, a neighborhood famed for art, music and revolutionary minds. Traversing the outside edge he’s recorded a dark and colourful society, from drag to hardcore, heroin, homelessness, political chaos and ultimately gentrification under the zero tolerance policy by Giuliani. Patterson’s odyssey from voyeur to provocateur reveals that it can take losing everything you love to find your own self.
Captured: New York Trailer

The symposium sets a parallel context for the changing heart of the city of Amsterdam. Looking backwards, Amsterdam has seen tolerant and turbulent times, from the early 1980’s until today. The city precociously struggles with its subcultures and individuals, its fraying edges and promiscuity and its squat scenes and political radicalism. Such characteristics have consistently held the creative scene captive and now set the backdrop for a debate positing the complexly intertwined realities of the effects of gentrification and the ideal of tolerant Amsterdam as a vibrant global city.

Wants the city be mainly attractive to tourists and the business community? And if yes, will that change the city itself to an Open air Museum? Don’t you loose the metropolitan allure by striving for that, because metropolitan élan also needs an fundamental openness for alternative views and manifestations that come without planning and regulations? And how correct is the blame of dulling (vertrutting) of Amsterdam’s inner city?

The film and symposium ‘Captured’ are part of NY400 (the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage to what would eventually be christened New Amsterdam)

Captured
Dir. Daniel Levin and Ben Solomon (US/2008/85 min)
Extra screenings: 20:00 hrs November 29/30
20.00 hrs December 1
22.00 hrs December 5/9/10

Admission: 7 Euro – students: 6 Euro – Cineville pas: free.