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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED - Educational Media Reviews Online | AUDIENCE CHOICE AWARD FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY - Chicago Latino Film Festival | BEST DOCUMENTARY - Baltimore International Black Film Festival
Urban Studies • Sociology • American Studies • Latinx Studies • African American Studies • American HistoryDate of Completion: 2018 | Run Time: 75 minutes | Language: English & Spanish with English subtitles. Spanish subtitles available | Captions: Yes | Includes: Curriculum, Engagement Strategies Guide & Transcript | Directors: Vivian Vázquez Irizarry & Gretchen Hildebran | Producers: Vivian Vázquez Irizarry, Gretchen Hildebran, Julia Steele Allen & Neyda Martinez
In the 1970s, the Bronx was on fire. Abandoned by the city government, nearly a half-million people were displaced as their close-knit, multi-ethnic neighborhood burned, reducing the community to rubble. While insidious government policies caused the devastation, Black and Puerto Rican residents bore the blame. In this story of hope and resistance, Bronx-born Vivian Vázquez Irizarry exposes the truth about the borough’s untold history and reveals how her embattled and maligned community chose to resist, remain and rebuild. DECADE OF FIRE tells the story of the South Bronx that you’ve never heard before, and offers us a roadmap for building the American communities we want and truly deserve.
Educational Media Reviews Online (EMRO) | Reviewed by Timothy W. Kneeland, History and Political Science Department, Nazareth College of Rochester
Highly Recommended
"This excellent documentary reexamines the decade of fire in the South Bronx, a period from the early 1970s until early 1980s when arson destroyed 80% of the housing and leaving 250,000 people lost their homes. For years the media narrative about this tragedy was that the people burned down their neighborhood. This falsehood is exposed by this thoughtful look at life in the South Bronx, as told by residents who lived there in the 1970s."
Films for the Feminist Classroom | Reviewed by Fushcia-Ann Hoover
"[The film] can be integrated into urban planning, ecology, human and natural interactions, and other environmental courses that can be found in fields in engineering, public health, geography, and policy."
"As both a warning and a call to action [it] can inform and empower students at all levels of higher education."
Queens College, CUNY | A. Bonilla, Adjunct Lecturer, Urban Studies
"Urban neighborhoods don’t just 'decay.' Political and economic choices are made to disinvest, pillage and abandon. In Bronx, in the 1970s, 'seven census tracts lost 97% of their buildings to arson, and forty-four lost 50%.' What happened and why is the subject of this excellent film. A must-see for any urban studies or sociology class. Highly recommended."
Video Librarian ★★★/4
"Interviews and archival footage show how grassroots efforts rallied the community to begin rebuilding itself, and the film concludes with Irizarry's strong feelings about current efforts to help the Bronx further evolve and prosper. Exploring a dark chapter in NYC history from both a historical and personal perspective, this is recommended."
The New York Times | Press Quotes
"[Co-director] Vázquez interweaves memories of her upbringing with a rundown of civic practices that, in combination, led to the Bronx’s decline. Some, like Robert Moses’s partitioning of the Bronx with the Cross Bronx Expressway or 'redlining' — the systematic denial of investment to neighborhoods dominated by racial minorities — will be familiar to any student of urban planning or New York history."
"[Vazquez’s] stake in the issues at hand is part of what makes Decade of Fire valuable. This is a filmmaker with skin in the game, close to the flames."
The New Yorker
"With this documentary’s blend of autobiography, firsthand observation, and historical analysis, the directors Vivian Vázquez and Gretchen Hildebran dispel pervasive myths about the devastation of the South Bronx in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Vázquez recalls her childhood there in the sixties, when the neighborhood was multicultural and thriving, and reveals the racist and classist decisions, public and private, that proved catastrophic, including highway construction, redlining, mortgage policy, the closing of firehouses, the layoffs of fire marshals, and police neglect. [...] The movie’s cautious optimism regarding community organization and neighborhood stakeholders also emphasizes the national urgency of diverse and informed local journalism."
Remezcla
"Decade of Fire is a call to arms, a family memoir, and a history lesson. More importantly, perhaps, it’s a love letter to the Bronx and its inhabitants."
Hammer to Nail
"(An) insightful look back at a time when one of the United States’ major cities allowed a once-vibrant neighborhood to fall into neglect and disrepair, ... Decade of Fire offers a moving portrait of what life was like under these conditions, and how people survived."
Film Threat
"The well-paced, tightly constructed, often crushingly emotional documentary is stirring and compelling throughout, illuminating both a dark chapter of New York City history and an all-too-common example of the extent to which inner-city people can be unjustly victimized by those in power."
METROGRAPH | Kazembe Balagun, Organizer and Cultural Historian
"The beauty of Decade of Fire is that it allows the survivors of the fires to tell their own stories. This is important because there is no official narrative by the city on exactly what happened. Decade of Fire is a reconciliation: at a community screening with a Bronx housing group, some in the audience were in tears. It was first time they were able to look beyond the haze and see the truth."
Architectural Record
"Decade of Fire, Gretchen Hildebran and Vivian Vázquez Irizarry’s exceptional documentary, is a visceral correction of the record. [...] A bounty of archival footage, data unearthed from city and ad-hoc archives, and contemporary interviews helps Vázquez Irizarry and Hildebran investigate the heartbreaking, infuriating tragedy of a minority neighborhood left for dead by white politicians and phantom landlords. [...] By expertly weaving past and present into a continuum of experience, Decade of Fire becomes less a history lesson and more a call to arms—for a neighborhood, and a nation, again in the crosshairs of an escalating urban emergency that threatens to replicate the cataclysms of urban renewal."
SLANT
"One of the film’s successes is its profound understanding of the neglect these communities experienced. There’s dread in the depiction of how racism informed that neglect, as well as in its deleterious effects. [...] Many of these actions are unknown and unconsidered by the general public, and Decade of Fire makes concerted efforts to enlighten us on those matters."
VULTURE
"The ashes have been swept away, but the Bronx — especially the South Bronx — was not so long ago a symbol for urban self-immolation. It’s the 'self' part and its concomitant racist stereotypes that’s vividly upended in Vivian Vázquez Irizarry and Gretchen Hildebran’s documentary, Decade of Fire. Using archival and home-movie footage, the film sets out to revise a dehumanizing media history and free people who have, says Bronx native Vázquez Irizarry, 'internalized the blame.'"
AWARDS
Audience Choice Award for Best Documentary | Chicago Latino Film Festival
Documentary Best Director | Newark International Film Festival
New York Showcase Award | Harlem International Film Festival
Best Documentary | Baltimore International Black Film Festival
Bronze Remi | Worldfest-Houston
Best Documentary Feature - Honorable Mention | Boston Latino International Film Festival
FESTIVALS
DOC NYC
Full Frame Documentary Film Festival
United Nations Association Film Festival
Global Peace Film Festival
Philadelphia Latino Film Festival
San Francisco Latino Film Festival
Cleveland International Film Festival
Milwaukee Film Festival
St. Louis International Film Festival
Oaxaca Film Fest
Maryland International Film Festival
Oakland International Film Festival
Buffalo International Film Festival
East x Northeast
SCREENINGS
Harvard University
UC Santa Barbara
Oberlin College
National Association for Multicultural Education
New York State Department of Health
Local Initiatives Support Corporation
Esperanza
Director & Producer of DECADE OF FIRE
REQUEST A GOOD TALK WITH VIVIAN VÁZQUEZ IRIZARRY
Director & Producer of DECADE OF FIRE
REQUEST A GOOD TALK WITH GRETCHEN HILDEBRAN
Gretchen Hildebran speaks to students and communities to share her experiences with collaborative filmmaking methods that center the perspectives of structurally marginalized communities. She offers valuable insight to students and professionals across disciplines who seek to address racial and economic injustice in their fields of expertise. Gretchen has been a featured speaker at Bryn Mawr College, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, Princeton University, Fordham University and Pratt University. Her work lives at the intersection of politics, policy and human experience. A 2005 graduate of Stanford’s MFA documentary program, Gretchen shot Ramona Diaz’s THE LEARNING (2011) and has edited for the History Channel, PBS, the United Nations Development Programme, and independent documentaries such as Vaishali Sinha’s 2017 ASK THE SEXPERT. She also makes public health media used to educate communities about life-saving interventions such as needle exchange and overdose prevention. Other credits include WORTH SAVING (2004) and OUT IN THE HEARTLAND (2005) which explored anti-gay legislation in Kentucky.
Producer & Impact Producer of DECADE OF FIRE
REQUEST A GOOD TALK WITH JULIA STEELE ALLEN
Julia Steele Allen is an award-winning multi- disciplinary artist and activist from New York City. DECADE OF FIRE first began as high school curriculum Julia developed for South Bronx youth who lacked access to the history of their community. Julia has developed the film's grassroots engagement campaign and connects it with the work of housing justice organizations nationwide. She worked for ten years as a community organizer in the South Bronx, and has been part of planning large-scale activist convenings such as the first Critical Resistance conference in 1998, the WTO protests in 1999, the first US Social Forum in 2007 and the Week of Action leading up to the Peoples Climate March in 2017. From 2014-2017 she toured her play, "Mariposa & the Saint: From Solitary Confinement, A Play Through Letters" performing for judges, wardens, corrections officials, legislators, as well as students, faith-based communities, and formerly incarcerated people as part of the growing movement to end solitary confinement in this country. Julia is the Co-Chair of the CASA (Community Action for Safe Apartments) Solidarity Board; a Bronx tenants’ rights and housing justice organization, and is a member of the queer, country band My Gay Banjo.