New York’s Park Avenue runs the length of Manhattan before crossing the river into the Bronx. The long stretch between Grand Central Terminal and 96th Street is home to some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Ten minutes to the north, over the Harlem River, Park Avenue enters the South Bronx. Here, more than half the residents receive food stamps, unemployment has reached 19% and children are 20 times more likely to be killed than their neighbours to the south.

In the palatial apartments of 740 Park Avenue, the wealthy are visited by presidents and senators, who are promised millions of campaign dollars in exchange for lower taxes. Residents of Park Avenue in Bronx can not influence presidents, suffer cuts in public spending and have seen the door to social mobility close. Through the story of the two Park Avenues, director Alex Gibney puts forward an eloquent argument that the extreme wealth of a few has been used to impose their ideas on the rest of America.

The American Dream poses an image of America that offers individual freedom and equal opportunity, but in recent years this has been tarnished. Today it is virtually impossible for those born in to poverty to climb the ladder of opportunity. Gibney gets to grips with inequality in America by focusing on how the system of privilege is kept in place and stacked against the poor of the country.

Alex Gibney is an Oscar, Emmy and Grammy award-winning producer and director.

Directed by Alex Gibney
Duration: 70′
Year: 2012

Dutch photographer, Teun Voeten, is an award winning photojournalist and author. He has covered conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan, Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza. His work has been featured in publications such as Vanity Fair, Newsweek, The New Yorker, and National Geographic, among others. Voeten is also a contributing photographer for organisations such as the International Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Human Rights Watch and the United Nations.

In the mid-nineties however, he took a break from war reporting. For five months he lived, slept and worked in a tunnel underneath Manhattan’s well-heeled Upper West Side. He lived alongside an eclectic mix of outsiders: Vietnam veterans, hippies, crack addicts, Cuban refugees, convicted killers, computer programmers, philosophical recluses and criminal runaways. His book on this community, Tunnel People was originally published in the Netherlands in 1996 and widely acclaimed for its anthropological and journalistic merits.

Recently Voeten went back to find his former co-inhabitants of New York’s Tunnels. In this updated version of Tunnel People, Voeten describes what has happened in the thirteen years since they were evicted from the tunnels and offered alternative housing by Amtrak. Hot on the heals of his New York book launch, Voeten will be at the Frontline Club to discuss his career and his experience of living underground in Manhattan.