“A Call to Action for Everybody To Preserve Their History Before It’s Gone”: Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker on The Stroll

Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker’s Sundance-premiering The Stroll is a beautifully and lovingly crafted time capsule of NYC’s Meatpacking District that mostly spans from Giuliani’s infamous “broken windows” reign of terror through Bloomberg’s post-9/11 “gentrification on steroids,” as one knowledgeable interviewee ruefully reflects (seconds after I coincidentally yelled those same words at my screener). Unsurprisingly, our billionaire mayor did indeed view unrestrained capitalism as the solution to every problem, including that of the “undesirable” communities — starving artists and sex workers — that called the neighborhood home. For me, the most revelatory aspect of this heartfelt walk down memory lane isn’t that it’s offered from the POV of the mostly Black trans sex workers (including director Lovell) who made their money working the area nicknamed “The Stroll,” but that the filmmakers were able to track down so many that both survived and thrived (at least a dozen, with some whose time went all the way back to the early ’80s, remarkably enough). Clear-eyed and unapologetic, this band of sisters somehow managed to avoid the fate of famous activist contemporaries like Marsha P. Johnson (whose body was found floating in the Hudson River in ‘92) and Sylvia Rivera (who died of complications from liver cancer in 2002 at age 51). Just prior to the film’s June 21 release on HBO, Filmmaker reached out to the co-directors to learn all about the process of using cinema to set the record on queer sex work history straight.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.