The latest film of Beyza Boyacıoğlu, a 2009 graduate of Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design who is currently a documentary director in America, was accepted to New York Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) Documentary Fortnight festival.
Boyacıoğlu’s documentary Toñita’s Club is a portrait of the last Puerto Rican social club in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The documentary will premier during MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight 2014 festival. The film will be a part of the American Stories short film program and will be screened on February 22 at 2 pm and February 23 at 5 pm. Screenings will be followed by discussions with directors Beyza Boyacıoğlu and Sebastian Diaz.
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/85047629
Toñita’s is a portrait of the last Puerto Rican social club in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a rapidly gentrified area that used to be a neighborhood of Caribbean immigrants. The short documentary dives into the microcosm of Caribbean Club (also fondly labeled ‘Toñita’s’ after its owner Maria Toñita), in order to talk about urban space, displacement and identity. The film zigzags between nightlife and daytime activities at the club, and the testimonies of its regulars. Music and dance constitute a crucial part of the film as Toñita’s is a love letter to Nuyorican culture. When the club scenes are interrupted with interviews, each testimony touches upon a specific issue, such as the history of the neighborhood, gentrification, Nuyorican music and dance, and Puerto Rican identity. The interviews paint a complicated picture of the neighborhood and the local community. Caribbean Club regulars confront the new South Side with mixed feelings, as they also reveal a sweet-sour relationship with the past. A recurring subject in the interviews is the owner Toñita, the matriarch of the community, devoted to keep the club open “until she falls”.
Toñita’s is produced at 2013 UnionDocs Collaborative Studio and is a part of UnionDocs’ Living Los Sures project. This multi-faceted project restores Diego Echeverria’s 1984 film Los Sures, makes it accessible to audiences online, remixes local histories through a web documentary platform, and reinvestigates Southside of Williamsburg, Brooklyn today through a collection of short films.
Beyza Boyacıoğlu is a New York, Cambridge and Istanbul based documentary filmmaker, video artist and curator. She was a fellow in 2012-2013 UnionDocs Collaborative Studio in Brooklyn. She curates ‘Fiction-Non’, a documentary series exploring narrative/non-fiction hybrid films, at Maysles Cinema in Harlem. Her work as a video artist has been exhibited in many venues including MoMA (New York), The Invisible Dog Art Center (Brooklyn), NoteOn (Berlin), and Sakıp Sabancı Museum (Istanbul). Sabancı University Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design 2009 graduate Boyacıoğlu currently works as a videographer and a video editor at Harvard University.
