Green Guerilla

In New York’s abandoned open spaces, groups of city-dwellers have sown their seeds and created a utopia, transforming urban wasteland into community gardens. The gardens are fragile havens within the immense city landscape, and still carry hidden traces of the city’s human history. It is in these spaces that their gardeners invent their roots, shape childhood memories for their offspring, find ways of improving their neighbourhood’s life. Despite pressure from property developers and hostility from the City Hall, which destroys several dozen of them each year, nearly 750 of these gardens still exist. The film focuses on the heart of these underprivileged districts to paint a human-scale portrait of New York, showing those who have built up fragile barriers against the law of the jungle-those men and women who have quite simply decided to put up a resistance.