Foreign Parts

Anthropological in scope, sensuous in detail, and emotionally resonant throughout, Foreign Parts hearkens back to the unsentimental poetry of James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as well as the urban advocacy of Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The film takes a local interest in the industrial Willets Point neighborhood in Queens, New York, where cars are scrapped, salvaged, and repaired. Without recourse to voiceover or direct interviews, Foreign Parts raises essential questions about urban renewal’s effects on pluralism and the city’s working class, yet remains adamantly concerned with the grain of human experience.