Located on Malcolm X Boulevard in the heart of Harlem, Maysles Documentary Center is housed in a small storefront building with a sign above the front door that lists upcoming movie screenings.
When I recently met the center’s new executive director Kazembe Balagun, he spoke excitedly about the youth trainings held downstairs as he guided me past the popcorn stand and into a small, 50-seat movie theater that feels like an enlarged version of a living room. Balagun then stepped behind the big screen at the front of the room. As he pushed against the wall behind the screen, it swung open––Batman style—and revealed a brightly lit room with several thick wooden desks that he and other Maysles staffers work from. On one of the desks sat a camera once used by the pioneering documentarian Albert Maysles.
“The great thing about working here is I’m at street level,” Balagun says of his position. “Anytime I step outside, I can have a conversation with our neighbors and really get a pulse of the community, and that informs a lot of our programming.”
Balagun is a longtime community organizer and cultural curator—he previously worked as the education director at the old Brecht Forum and as a project manager at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. I’ve known him for more than 20 years and was delighted to learn that this widely respected figure on the New York left would now be positioned to make a big impact from his new perch at the intersection of film, activism and social movements. So I made my way up to Harlem to see what he was thinking. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Talk about growing up in Harlem.
I learned how to swim at Jackie Robinson Pool on 145th Street. I did my first research project at Macombs Dam Library. I remember Liberation Books used to be near here. For me, Harlem was always a small southern village come up north. People were politically savvy, sweet and smart. We knew there was a larger world out there, and a Black world as well.
Is Harlem still a Black cultural mecca? Or has gentrification sapped its cultural creativity?
Harlem is still very much the voice of Black America. For a long time you had a “majoritarian consciousness” in Harlem of being a Black majority on top of Manhattan. That concentration of Black folks gave our churches, our civic organizations [and] our radical organizations a sense of being a center of deep democratic yearning and reform in this country. That was something that was widely expressed. You also always had a vibrant gay community, a vibrant Muslim community.
People come to Maysles as strangers and leave as family.
Fast forward to the late ‘90s and 2000s and you see an influx of white folks. You can put in a Whole Foods or a Church of Latter Day Saints and say we lost Harlem. But I think what this moment calls for is a reappraisal of that deep democratic coalition that is built around justice [and] that harkens back to the past while being both multicultural and Black at the same time. Harlem attracts people who are progressive-minded and want to be here for a reason. Whether you’re white or Black or other, you have to deal with the fact that Harlem is tremendously over-policed and under-resourced. There’s high maternal mortality rates, high asthma rates, no bike lanes. There’s so many different ways Harlem is under-resourced.
What role can an art-house cinema like Maysles play?
We’re going to continue to be a place of education where people can participate without money being an issue — a place where people can gather, debate, have good conversations based on good, wholesome information.
What makes Maysles special?
There’s a couple of things. One, there’s a multiracial community that respects and champions Black people. Also, we have a knowledgeable staff from the film curators, to the projectionists, to the popcorn vendors.
Right now the process of movie production is entirely controlled by the 1%. Multinational companies like Amazon or Apple are controlling our desires and dreams. You can get caught up in the fantasy of watching a film. The 1% wants us to focus on our screens. The goal of people’s artists is to look at the screen and also get people to look and “see” each other. We have a saying: People come to Maysles as strangers and leave as family.
What do you mean when you say that Maysles is creating a people’s democratic film culture?
With the films we screen, we are turning our audience into critics—and critics into artists. We are creating the basis for social reproduction of thought from the ground level up. So you take these tools and apply them to your own community. The thing about micro-cinema is that you can replicate it anywhere. You can have five seats in your living room and that’s a micro-cinema. In the old school in Third World countries, there might have been only one movie camera in the whole country, and the whole national liberation movement had to use that one movie camera and share that. So if you have one camera in your whole neighborhood, that can be the basis for a unit to create a film. You are talking about the pooling of resources. But the resources are not just technology, but the people themselves.
What is it about watching movies that is special?
When you see a movie, you’re just laying back and allowing someone to tell a story. Your blood pressure goes down. Your heart rate goes down. If you’re in a theater, not in front of your computer, it’s even better. You get to relax with other people. You don’t realize it, but you all are breathing in harmony. You’re sharing a communal breath together. And that’s a powerful thing.
What kind of films do you want to screen?
I want to hit as many notes as possible. I want to have politically challenging films. I want to have contemporary films. I want to have avant-garde films. I also want to connect films to impacted communities. I want to start having kids’ days. I want to have family days. And in the summer I want to continue to have outdoor screenings so people can have that communal experience together. We’ll also continue to do film festivals. We just wrapped up our Harlem international film festival. Our Black Panther Film Festival is in October.
For more see, maysles.org.
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