Author, filmmaker and twenty-year plus Fort Greene resident Nelson George walks around the area and through the life of his friends and colleagues, celebrating the creativity, hard partying and love stories of true a true black bohemia.  “Brooklyn Boheme” was a street slang term people used, sometimes affectionately and sometimes not, to describe the folks who lived the area.  Unlike the legendary Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, which was largely a literary scene, the artists collected in these neighborhoods were as involved with newer means of expression (film, rock music, hip hop, avante garde theater, stand-up comedy, photography) as with traditional African-American artistic pursuits (poetry, jazz.)


While there has been a lot of nostalgia, in documentaries and gallery exhibits, for the gritty downtown Manhattan of the ‘80s, across the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn a college educated, ambitious group of neighbors overcame crack heads and crime to make the area a hip destination. George, in collaboration with documentary and commercial director Diane Paragas, explores why several generations of African-Americans settled in Fort Greene/Clinton Hill and how its been transformed in the last decade by gentrification. 


Some of the most influential figures in black pop culture of this era called Fort Greene home at one point or another in the 1980s and ‘90s, from Spike Lee to novelist Terry McMillian, from jazzmen Wynton & Branford Marsalis to hip hop icon Notorious BIG to neo-soul goddess Erykah Badu, and their work was very effected by the people they met and the strong sense of community they shared.