‘Communities of Resilience’ at SAC

In celebration of Black History Month, Hamptons Doc Fest and the Southampton Arts Center are co-presenting a program on Saturday, February 22, at 4 p.m., titled “Communities of Resilience.”

The program opens with a keynote presentation by Dr. Georgette Grier-Key, executive director of the Eastville Community Historical Society, and Renee Simons, the president of SANS Sag Harbor, who will recount the history of and preservation journey of the three historic Black Sag Harbor neighborhoods of Sag Harbor Hills, Azurest and Ninevah, which in 2019 were placed on the National and New York State Registers of Historic Places.

Their keynote serves as a contrast to the destruction of the Manhattan neighborhood of San Juan Hill presented in the new documentary “San Juan Hill: Manhattan’s Lost Neighborhood” (60 min.), directed by Emmy Award winner Stanley Nelson. The screening will be followed by a virtual Q&A with Nelson, who in 2015 received Hamptons Doc Fest’s prestigious Pennebaker Career Achievement Award.

The film “San Juan Hill” enjoyed its world premiere in October 2024 at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, as a 62nd New York Film Festival Special Event. It traces the neighborhood’s rise and fall, from a cultural mecca with bustling musical clubs, theaters, artist spaces and businesses in the first part of the 20th century to its destruction in the 1940s and 1950s when the neighborhood’s largely Black working-class population was displaced to make way for Lincoln Center, Fordham University, the Amsterdam Houses and other developments.

The Charleston dance craze, the singer Josephine Baker and jazz pianist Thelonious Monk are some of the cultural legacies of the era, all memorialized in the film’s historical footage, interviews with former residents and narration by Academy Award-winning actress Ariana DeBose.

After the screening, director Stanley Nelson who is regarded as today’s leading documentarian of the African-American experience, will join the audience for an online interview. Over the course of his career, he has been the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, five Primetime Emmy Awards, several lifetime achievement awards, and the National Medal in the Humanities from President Barack Obama in 2013.

Tickets are $15, ($10 for SAC members) southamptonartscenter.org or at the door. The Southampton Arts Center is at 25 Jobs Lane.