New York: A Documentary Film

About the Screening and Panel Discussion

Join us for an advance preview of two exciting new chapters of NEW YORK: A Documentary Film, the award-winning, 17 1/2-hour public television series. The evening will feature a screening of selected excerpts from episodes nine and ten, “The Future of Cities,” followed immediately by a panel discussion with the series’ creators Ric Burns and James Sanders. 

About the New Episodes

NEW YORK: The Future of Cities—episodes nine and ten in the ongoing series chronicling the dramatic story of one of the greatest cities on the planet—explores the eventful history of New York across the tumultuous first two decades of the 21st century, starting in the aftermath of 9/11, as the city rebuilt and re-conceived itself on a breathtaking scale, and rose to become the supreme exemplar of a global “superstar city” in an era one scholar has called the “new urban age.”

As these transformations occurred, the city would grapple with the challenges facing cities everywhere—including issues of infrastructure, governance, immigration, social justice, and equity—at the same time confronting an unprecedented series of world-historic crises—political, financial, climatic, and now epidemiological—each different, each existential, each global in reach, each calling on every ounce of the extraordinary resilience and creativity and individual and collective commitment the city can muster—and each, in their way, calling into question the future of cities.

Produced by the same team that created the original NEW YORK series, The Future of Cities presents a sweeping and dramatic portrait of New York since September 11th—a city which, by the dawn of the 21st century, had emerged with stunning swiftness from decades of urban decline, to assert its place at the very center of a new and now globalized urban culture.

NEW YORK: THE FUTURE OF CITIES coming soon to PBS
A Steeplechase Films production in association with WNET/Thirteen and PBS
Directed by Ric Burns
Written by James Sanders and Ric Burns  
Produced by Bonnie Lafave, Leigh Howell, Emily Pfeil and James Sanders
Executive Producer Margaret Munzer Loeb

Event Schedule

• 6:30 PM: Opening Remarks
• 6:45 PM: Screening of Episodes 9 & 10 (selected excerpts)
• 7:45 PM: Panel Discussion
• 8:30 PM: Reception 
   

Welcome Remarks

• Stephanie Hill Wilchfort, Ronay Menschel Director and President, Museum of the City of New York
• Stephen Segaller, Vice President of Programming, The WNET Group
• Ric Burns, Director and Series Creator, NEW YORK: A Documentary Film 
   

Panel 

• Ric Burns, Director and Series Creator, NEW YORK: A Documentary Film
• James Sanders, Writer, Producer, and Series Creator, NEW YORK: A Documentary Film 
   

Moderator 

• Elisabeth Sherman, Robert A. and Elizabeth Rohn Jeffe Chief Curator and Deputy Director, Museum of the City of New York