The Stroll

Co-directed by Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker, this documentary tells the history of New York's Meatpacking District in the words of the trans sex workers who worked there. Lovell worked those streets for a decade and built the film by bringing her old friends back together. Its strength is that the account comes from inside. Policing, homelessness, violence and the clean-up operations of the nineties are conveyed not in an outside observer's language but in the language of the people who lived them. Gentrification is not an abstraction here; it means specific people being removed from specific streets. The archive material is drawn from news footage and personal recordings. The film also takes up the distance between the institutionalisation of the trans movement and those who stayed on the street, a tension most documentaries skip. It screened at Sundance. Who it's for: those interested in trans history, the urban history of New York and documentaries told from inside. Who it's not for: viewers who want to avoid accounts of violence and policing; the film relays them in detail.