Street Fight

Street Fight chronicles the bare-knuckles race for Mayor of Newark, New Jersey, between Cory Booker, a 32-year-old Rhodes Scholar/Yale Law School graduate, and Sharpe James, the four-term incumbent and undisputed champion of New Jersey politics.

Fought in Newark's neighborhoods and housing projects, the battle pits Booker against an old-style political machine that uses any means necessary to crush its opponents: City workers who do not support the mayor are demoted; "disloyal" businesses are targeted by code enforcement; a campaigner is detained and accused of terrorism; and disks of voter data are burglarized in the night.

Even the filmmaker is dragged into the slugfest, and by Election Day, the climate becomes so heated that the Federal government is forced to send in observers to watch for cheating and violence.

The battle sheds light on important American questions about democracy, power and—in a surprising twist—race. Both Booker and James are African-American Democrats, but when the mayor accuses the Ivy League-educated Booker of not being "really black," it forces voters to examine both how we define race in this country.

Street Fight tells a gripping story of the underbelly of democracy where elections are not about spin doctors, media consultants or photo opportunities. In Newark, we discover, elections are won and lost in the streets.

Trailer

Credits

Director/Producer/ Cinematographer/Writer/Editor: Marshall Curry
Executive Producers: Liz Garbus, Rory Kennedy, Cara Mertes, Sally Jo Fifer
Composer:James Baxter
Running time: 82 min.
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About the Filmmaker

MARSHALL CURRY was the director, producer, director of photography and editor of the Academy Award-nominated documentary, Street Fight.

In 2005 Marshall was selected by Filmmaker Magazine as one of "25 New Faces of Independent Film," and he was awarded the International Documentary Association (IDA) Jacqueline Donnet Emerging Documentary Filmmaker Award.

In 2007 he received the International Trailblazer Award at MIPDOC in Cannes.

He has been a guest lecturer at Harvard, Duke, New York University and other colleges, and he has served on juries for the IDA and Hot Docs Film Festival.

Before making Street Fight, Curry worked for a number of years as a senior producer at Icon Nicholson, a New York multimedia design firm, where he produced and directed interactive documentaries and websites for the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and others.

Independently, he has shot, edited and directed a number of short films including The Day The Indians Won (for the Rainforest Foundation US), which tells the story of the Panará Indians in Brazil who successfully won back their land, and Negril Elementary (for the Rockhouse Foundation), which chronicles an education project in Jamaica.

Curry is a graduate of Swarthmore College, where he studied comparative religion.