Bronx Stage&Film Company

A home of one's own - that's the American dream. So what happens when the dreamers are immigrants, factory workers, and Communists? In 'At Home in Utopia,' 2000 working people manage to build their own cooperative apartment house in the
Bronx, as part of their plan to transform American capitalism. But as every organizer knows, you can't change the world by yourself. The film asks, what makes a strong community? The United Workers Cooperative Colony, aka the Coops, began Eastern European Jewish in the 1920s, and its members saw
themselves as part of a national and international movement the
strength of which blows minds today. With its sunlit, landscaped courtyards, the Coops gave them a way out of the slums - an escape made possible by the nearby subway which carried them daily to their factory jobs, unions, and demonstrations down town. By the 1930s people in the Coops opted to bring their slogans of racial justice and integration to life in their own courtyards, with unexpected consequences. Were they stronger in their diversity? An epic tale of radicalism across two generations, the film tracks the rise and fall of one community into the 1950s, paying close attention to the passions that bound them together and those that tore them apart. Along the way, 'At Home in Utopia' bears witness to lives lived with courage across the barriers of race, nation, language, convention, and
sometimes even common sense.

Credits
Coproducer: Ellen Brodsky
Director, Producer: Michal Goldman
Cinematographer: Boyd Estus
Editor: Michal Goldman
Voice Over: Linda Lavin
Original Music/Composer: John Kusiak

Ellen Brodsky (Coproducer) has produced a number of short documentaries on health and early childhood education. "Dental Farmer," a documentary about a free dental clinic in West Virginia, won Directors’ Choice at the Black Maria Film Festival. She holds a Masters Degree from the Heller School of Social Policy at Brandeis University.

Michal Goldman (Director, Editor, Producer) started working in documentary editing rooms as an interesting way to support herself while she followed her real calling, modern dance, in New York City. Eventually things switched around, and she began to put her heart and soul into her own films, dancing (African, whenever possible) to stay strong. She started doing film work during the civil rights era, which was also the era of cinema verite, and her own work has developed in response. She has lived and worked in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Cairo – and Boston again, where she founded the Filmmakers Collaborative and the Boston Jewish Film Festival. Goldman produces, directs, writes and edits her films, which include "A Jumpin’ Night in the Garden of Eden," the first film to document the klezmer revivial; "Umm Kulthum, a Voice like Egypt", about Umm Kulthum, the great diva of Arabic song; "Epiphany in Progress," documenting the first year in a new, faith-based inner-city school; and "At Home in Utopia," about three decades, two generations, and one apartment complex in the Bronx.