Handball Court
Across the street from UNDO
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

Save the date! We’re back with our annual Preview in the Park, debuting a new collection of 7 short documentaries made by the talented artists in the UnionDocs Collaborative Studio (CoLAB).

This year’s films emerge from a shared research focus on sanitation, waste streams, discard culture, labor, and the hidden infrastructures that move material through and out of New York City every day.

Rooted on the border of Ridgewood and Bushwick, we have become increasingly aware of our proximity to sanitation garages, scrap yards, transfer stations, and industrial routes that are often overlooked but quietly shape the rhythms of the city at large, and offer this collection of films to bring these spaces and systems into focus.

From the workforces official and unofficial, like the 10,000+ New Yorkers who redeem recyclables for 5 cents on the can every day, to New York’s strongest— the city’s sanitation force, or the environmental saviors like the mussels in Newtown Creek that have filtered a century’s worth of pollution, the films look closely at the various forms of labor that sustain the city every day.

They also trace the sites of disposal and the methods of claiming and relinquishing ownership that take place across typical and not-so-typical sites of discard: a notorious plaza under the train that has become a hotspot for illegal dumping, weekly auction yards for cars picked up on the street, and the thousands of estate sales that leave formerly beloved and now unwanted objects for the taking — or on a direct pathway to the infamous garbage truck hopper.

Together, these films explore sanitation not only as disposal, but as an ongoing civic system and choreography that reflects our values: what’s kept? what’s discarded? who decides? who benefits, or suffers? and who labors through these processes? And of course, what futures could shift if there was more attention paid to these questions?

Come through to watch these incredible new films under the stars and in community at Starr Playground on Onderdonk Ave.

Doors open at 7:30 PM and screenings begin at sunset, around 8:30 PM.

After the films, we’ll invite everyone back to UNDO to celebrate with drinks, a dj set from radiodevil (aka Jess Jara-Williams) and a festive chance to gather and toast the work of these amazing teams.

Stay tuned for the full lineup!

Program

Over 10,000 New Yorkers are full time canners. Look beyond the passing glance on the street into the dynamic world of redemption centers facing mass closures in New York State. 

Object Permanence is an experimental short film that follows the lives of inanimate objects as they experience an estate sale. As their worth is reevaluated, debated, or discarded, the film becomes a meditation on value itself.

In In Every Crack and Crevice, the mussels of Newtown Creek bear witness to the waterway’s past, present, and future as they filter through over a century’s worth of pollution.

Children narrate and react to the wonders of the New York Sanitation Department’s
garbage trucks through a series of abstract animations.

A plaza under the train has become a hot spot for illegal dumping. Trash Triangle presents a stage for community activation of this unused public space.

New York’s Department of Sanitation has earned the nickname “New York’s Strongest” due to the physical demands of the labor. Bodybuilder Michael “Mikey Arms” Squiciari shares what it takes to last.

The NYPD is responsible for towing cars which have accrued more than $350 in debt of fines to the city. Once the car is towed to the impound lot, and has not been reclaimed, it is sold off at auction to the highest bidder. This film reckons with access to a ritual; what does the camera do as it watches property which simultaneously belongs to its owner, the carceral state, and a crowd of prospective new owners? When theft is made legal, who keeps the system running? What is the price of retaining a car as your own property?

ABOUT THE UNIONDOCS COLLABORATIVE STUDIO

The UnionDocs Collaborative Studio is a fellowship program for non-fiction media research and group production. It seeks to bring together individual talents, voices, and stories to create multi-dimensional documentaries. For the past 10 months, fellows have been immersed in research, idea generation, planning, recording, edits, critiques, and re-edits. Teams were formed around a set of select proposals, which all moved through the stages of production in tandem. In addition to this production work, fellows engage in masterclasses, seminars, and workshops on the history, theory and practice of documentary arts.

Billie McKelvie is a multimedia artist living and working in New York City. She is the co-director of Over the Board (NYC Short Documentary Film Festival 2025). In independent film, she’s worked on a number of sets in New York in the camera and production departments and co-created Easy Eight Productions. 

Katyayani Kumar is a philosopher who writes and a poet who films. A director, writer, and editor raised between the US and India, her work moves between fiction and nonfiction, exploring stories that slip into the margins, waiting to be rediscovered. Her short “Coffined at Fifteen,” made with Afghan refugees, premiered to a sold-out house at the Oscar-qualifying Dances With Films Festival. Her feature documentary “Sons of the River” has been supported by Tribeca, DOC NYC, Hot Docs, Film Bazaar, and others. Kumar is a Film Independent Documentary Story Lab Fellow and an Editing Fellow at the American Film Institute. She was selected by Academy Award–winning producer Guneet Monga to represent India at TIFF as part of the Women in Film delegation. As committed to the ecosystem as she is to her own work, Kumar is a TEDx speaker, has taught filmmaking in rural areas of North India, and is passionate about expanding the infrastructure of nonfiction for the future generation of storytellers alongside her own. 

Sté Sassen is a visual anthropologist and artist known for her film Help Me Help You (2024). Her practice is intuitive and deeply inspired by symbolism, psychology, (neo-)conceptual art and the interrelationships between people, public spaces and nature. Her work mirrors the female gaze, ethics of representation, and humans’ capacity for transformation. Colors, sunrays, shadows, reflections and water are often aesthetics that draw her into metaphysical reflections or the magical mundane.

Nichole Whitney is a documentary filmmaker and photographer based in Portland, Maine. Her first short documentary, The Round Forest, premiered at the Camden International Film Festival in 2025. Her work centers on memory, loss, and creative reimagining.

Jules Bradley is a farmer and mutli-media documentary artist with a background in audio storytelling based in Flatbush, Brooklyn. She co-directed Inherited, an anthology of climate audio stories from youth around the world spanning from reported features to speculative fiction. Her independent audio short “Thank You for Calling” was a 2022 BBC Radio pick of the year. Her curiosities lie in stories of rupture, communal imagination, and the layers of place – to name a few. 

ann haeyoung is an artist and writer based in Queens, NY. Their work explores industrial histories, labor, and infrastructure through video, text, and research-based projects. They have shown their work at venues including Human Resources, the Roswell Museum, and The Mistake Room, and their work has been published in Wired Magazine, FLAT Journal, and Solitude Journal. They are the co-founder of Broken Things Collective, which organizes Repair Cafe NYC, a community-based repair workshop.

David Scheckel is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker from New Jersey with experience in both documentary and narrative filmmaking. Through his background in social history, his work approaches documentary practice with a focus on collective understandings and place-based storytelling.

Adam Mbowe is a Gambian-Canadian filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal. Working across documentary, performance, and experimental forms, they explore memory, identity, and the complexities of Black diasporic experience. Blending personal history with collective narratives.

Tomás Orrego is a Peruvian multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker with a background in architecture, visual art and graphic design based in Brooklyn. Through humor, experimental approaches and absurdity, his work explores desire and its construction. His films have been screened internationally as part of various festivals and have been included in renowned platforms such as Labocine. His film, Fever, was selected as a semi finalist in the 2024 Student Academy Awards and his 16mm film Hotwire My Heart won the Kostanski Award at the BizarroLand Film Festival. His work extends to directing music videos, designing title sequences and posters for films and illustrating album covers and concert flyers for a wide range of musicians.

Teddy Kentor is an emerging documentary filmmaker based in New York. Before documentary, he led the product experience for election coverage at The Washington Post and served as Director’s Assistant on a scripted series at Netflix.

Emily Graves is an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Her short documentary THE GOATS OF MONESIGLIO, 2022, screened internationally (DOC NYC, SIFF, Sebastopol) and was nominated for a CSA for Best Short Documentary. She is currently in development on her first feature documentary BECOMING A LANDSCAPE (working title), which was selected to participate in the DOC Institute’s Breakthrough Development Lab in 2022, the Hot Docs-Netflix Incubator 2024-25 and UnionDocs’ Early Production Lab 2025.

Anna Heisterkamp is an artist and filmmaker from Dublin, Ireland. Their work focuses on archiving and abstracting the present, investigating structural issues through a spatial lens, and questioning how systems of power function. An editor and cinematographer by trade, they have directed over twent music videos and multiple moving image pieces which have been shown in galleries in Dublin, Limerick and Belfast.

radiodevil is a Jersey native with an unshakeable goal to make the people move. Carrying the energy of home onto the dance floor, she blends Jersey club, Brazilian funk, House, Hustle, Bounce, and Latin rhythms shaped by her Ecuadorian roots. She came up alongside the women-led DJ collective SIREN, where she developed a high-energy sound rooted in experimentation, movement, and community. Since then, she’s shared lineups with and opened for artists including Andrew VanWyngarden, Ravyn Lenae, and Joey Bada$$.