Scorsese, Coppola, ‘West Side Story,’ and More New York Stories Headline Film Forum’s Tenement Film Series — Watch the Trailer

Hudson Square’s beloved Film Forum is bringing more than 50 classics set in New York City to its screens starting February 6 through February 26.

“Tenement Stories: From Immigrants to Bohemians,” per Film Forum, illuminates “over a century of New York City history as captured on screen in tenement homes and working-class neighborhoods, giving voice to the immigrants, migrants, refugee families, and bohemians whose lives and labors shaped the city.”

IndieWire shares the fresh trailer for the series exclusively below.

The series includes iconic New York movies — as well as ones ready for a new spotlight — by Martin Scorsese, King Vidor, Charles Chaplin, Francis Ford Coppola, Lois Weber, Elia Kazan, Sergio Leone, Shirley Clarke, John Huston, Buster Keaton, D.W. Griffith, William Wyler, Leon Ichaso, Robert Wise, Raoul Walsh, Jules Dassin, Preston Sturges, Joan Micklin Silver, Sean Baker, and many more.

Annie Polland of the Tenement Museum will be among the special guests of the series, and as she said in a statement to Film Forum, “The Film Forum series shows these real life dramas through film, letting you time travel through the tenements, from the Yiddish-speaking sweatshop in ‘Uncle Moses’ to a young Irish American girl’s awakening in ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ to Martin Scorsese’s portrait of his parents in ‘Italianamerican’ to more recent tenement life, as seen through the eyes of Latino, Chinese, Iranian, and other New Yorkers.”

Guests will also include Cathy Scorsese, Martin’s daughter and the granddaughter of his immigrant parents; Peter McCrea, son of Joel McCrea, star of William Wyler’s “Dead End”; and more.

Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum’s repertory artistic director, said, “In the silent and early talkie eras, Hollywood churned out cinematic fantasies about the super-rich, but there were also many movies set in New York’s so-called tenement districts, particularly the Lower East Side of Manhattan, once the most densely populated place on earth. That and other neighborhoods, like Harlem, East Harlem and parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx, also had an avid moviegoing population — in the 1930s and ’40s, the Lower East Side alone had over 30 movie theaters, from fleapits to palaces — so people were seeing versions of their own lives reflected onscreen. The same neighborhoods would show up in later movies, but with New York’s changing population represented.”

Watch the trailer for the film series below ahead of its February 6 launch date.