from february through april

The East Village of New York City is a microcosm of loss due to the Covid-19 pandemic. It has been a bastion of mom-and-pop entrepreneurship for many decades. My new short film, "from february through april", documents the over two hundred restaurants and stores that were closed during the months of February through April of 2021.

I methodically traversed the East Village, starting at East Fourteenth Street and heading west, then down Third Avenue/Bowery, east on Houston Street, north and south on the other avenues starting at Second Avenue to Avenue D, and then east and west across the streets, from East First to East Thirteenth Street. This film covers an entire neighborhood filled with grief. There is an absence of people on the streets, along with closed businesses and increased graffiti.

"from february to april" has a direct relationship with my earlier film "epistrophy" that I finished in March of 2020, just weeks before the Covid-19 shutdown. "epistrophy" follows the patterns of pedestrians in New York City, when the streets still teemed with inhabitants. Small balletic dramas play out as people rush from home to work and back. Although the scenes are spontaneous, some of the narratives seem almost as if they were scripted. People brush up against one another, and the scenes unfold slowly, unlike the masked pedestrians whom rush by in "from february through april".

Alex C. Huddleston’s original music that accompanies "from february through april" is based on Bach chorales that he has deconstructed and intertwined together with the ambient sounds captured on the street. Huddleston’s music evokes a lament for a city in a dark moment of its history.

Towards the end of the film when we reach Ninth Street and St Mark’s Place, footage that was captured in early April, pedestrians are more numerous and life begins to reemerge in the area. The great hope is that this film is a relic of a short-lived time when the East Village, and the United States, was ravaged by the pandemic.