In the film we time-travel through New York from the 1980s to the present and back... with intermediate stops along the way. We see midtown Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, the subways... as they were and as they are. The film brings us back to the housing abandonment and subway graffiti of the 1980s and brings us forward to the pandemic of 2020 and 2021. We see a pre-pandemic Manhattan that is thriving and prosperous for some. We witness an ever-changing City -- but we also see parallels.

This is not a conventional documentary. There are no talking-head interviews and there is no voice-over narration. But neither is this an unstructured assortment of kaleidoscopic images. Rather, the film aims to guide the viewer through the far-flung precincts of New York in space and time. The subject is New York – past present and future.

There's something inherently fascinating about a city's gradual changes over time ... just as is the case with the aging of a person. There is that which is constant ... and there is that which changes beyond recognition. But this continuity and change (on this scale of time) is not available to us as a matter of ordinary lived experience. Only cinema can lift the veil so that we can bear witness.

Hopefully, the film will tap into the raw emotional power of memory (for those who lived in New York over the past few decades) and of curiosity (for those who did not).

No stock footage was used. All footage was shot by the filmmaker.


“New York Then and Now” was exhibited in the Short Film Corner of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival and in film festivals in Berlin, Los Angeles, Miami, Munich and San Francisco.