Lost Bohemia

“A lovely and tragic portrait of a dying community.”—Village Voice

One of this year’s surprise hits, Lost Bohemia will strike a chord with anyone who enjoyed Bill Cunningham New York. For over 100 years, significant 20th-century artists and performers (including Marilyn Monroe, Isadora Duncan, Barnett Newman, Norman Mailer, Marlon Brando, George Balanchine, and Bill Cunningham) lived and worked in 165 studios and apartments atop Carnegie Hall. In 2001, the Carnegie Hall Corporation began to systematically evict the artists (some in residence for over 40 years), destroy the studios, and convert the spaces into offices. Alarmed by the situation, photographer Josef Astor, a resident of the Carnegie Hall Studios for over twenty years, began to film his neighbors: a ballet school, drama classes, dancers, singers, photographers, sculptors, painters, and writers. Lost Bohemia is his intimate, affectionate portrait of these extraordinary witnesses to decades of artistic history as they battled to save their apartments and their rich history. (77 mins., video)