Series Site
"A transmission from a bygone New York City, Downtown ‘81 follows Jean-Michel Basquiat on a journey through the underground. Shelved for nearly 20 years, by the time Edo Bertoglio and Glenn O’Brien’s vision of Lower Manhattan reached an audience in 2000, the scene they’d captured had already been enshrined as a long-departed golden age of artistic expression and cultural ferment. With this series, Downtown ‘81 joins a legion of films reflecting, imagining, and creating the image of New York City in 1981, uptown, downtown and beyond, from the crime and corruption of Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City, to the cosmopolitan conversation in Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre, to Frederick Wiseman dissecting the art and artifice of the fashion industry in Model, to the avant garde happenings of The Squat Theater’s Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free."