Los Sures + Toñita's (12A*)

A brilliant and captivating documentary about a lost, Puerto Rican Brooklyn, that from its modern hipster incarnation, you'd never guess existed.

This 1984 documentary was the talk of the town last year among New York cinephiles upon its week-long revival at Manhattan’s coolest new arthouse cinema, the Metrograph, on the Lower East Side.

A cinema verite-style portrait of South Williamsburg, back when it was a largely poor and Puerto Rican area, it is composed of five vignettes each telling the story of a different resident. 'If it ain’t one struggle, it’s another struggle … you’re always fightin’,' says Cuso, a builder. Yes there’s crime, drugs, gangs. But there’s also community, culture, creativity.

Brooklyn-based Uniondocs, the company responsible for unearthing and restoring this film, commissioned several new films as a response to the original, looking at the neighbourhood as it is today. We screen one, Toñita’s, for you here; a documentary portrait of the last Puerto Rican social club in South Williamsburg, it delves into the microcosm of this one club, in order to talk about urban space, displacement and identity.