Criterion Press Release: Chop Shop (Blu-ray) (1 Viewer)

[Ronald Epstein]

​

For his acclaimed follow-up to Man Push Cart, Ramin Bahrani once again turned his camera on a slice of New York City rarely seen on-screen: Willets Point, Queens, an industrial sliver of automotive-repair shops that remains perpetually at risk of being redeveloped off the map. It’s within this precarious ecosystem that twelve-year-old Ale (Alejandro Polanco) must grow up fast, hustling in the neighborhood chop shops to build a more stable life for himself and his sister (Isamar Gonzales) even as their tenuous circumstances force each to compete with other struggling people and make desperate decisions. A deeply human story of a fierce but fragile sibling bond being tested by hardscrabble reality, Chop Shop tempers its sobering authenticity with flights of lyricism and hope.
FILM INFO

• Ramin Bahrani
• United States
• 2007
• 84 minutes
• Color
• 1.78:1
• English
• Spine #1067

DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• High-definition digital master, supervised and approved by director Ramin Bahrani, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Audio commentary from 2006 featuring Bahrani, director of photography Michael Simmonds, and actor Alejandro Polanco
• New program featuring a conversation among Bahrani, Polanco, actor Ahmad Razvi, and assistant director Nicholas Elliott about the making of the film
• New conversation between Bahrani and writer and scholar Suketu Mehta on the immigrant experience in New York City and on film
• Rehearsal footage from 2006 featuring Polanco and actors Isamar Gonzales and Carlos Zapata
• Trailer
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: An essay by novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen
  
  New cover by La Moutique
  
  February 23, 2021

 

[Ronald Epstein]

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[bujaki]

I discovered Bahrani's film by chance and loved them. This is one of them.