'Decade of Fire' Reframes Facts of Relentless New York '70s South Bronx Fires

Co-directors Vivian Vázquez Irizarry and Gretchen Hildebran join forces with producer Julia Steele Allen in reframing the 1970s story of New York’s South Bronx on fire. Their new documentary ‘Decade of Fire’ airs on PBS Independent Lens November 4.

Co-director Vázquez Irizarry sits at center of the film, retracing her Bronx childhood as one of living among burning apartment buildings and determined people undaunted by catastrophic events. Fire is front and center in American minds this week, with California burning. The national consciousness was never focused on the Bronx, once the scene of a classic American “movin’ on up” story.

The three women are all activists. Hollywood and Women interviewed Vivian Vázquez Irizarry and Gretchen Hildebran in April 2019, providing a consciousness-raising backdrop of the history and evolution of the documentary. Vázquez Irizarry explains:

The concept for this film began in 2002 as a curriculum for students at a South Bronx high school, where Julia and Vivian worked together. They noticed how young people in the Bronx carried its stigma, but had little access to its true history. This curriculum was rejected for being “too radical,” but began a dialogue which Vivian and Julia invited me to join, which began a 10-year journey of uncovering and shaping Vivian’s lived history into a compelling story that could reach a broad audience who have never had a chance to glimpse behind the stereotypes that have defined the South Bronx for the last 40 years.

'Seven Seconds' Actor Clare-Hope Ashitey Is Lensed By Paul Morel For The Last Magazine April 2018

British actor Clare-Hope Ashitey is styled by Adele Cany in images by Paul Morel for The Last Magazine April 2018./ Hair by Brady Lea

In a movie industry where female actors often lack 'deep' roles, Ashitey has them fall into her lap. Last-Magazine's Gautam Balasundar writes: "Growing up, Ashitey was academically inclined and never really entertained the idea of acting as a career option. At eighteen, that changed when she landed a starring role in Alfonso Cuarón’s powerful dystopian film 'Children of Men', about a polluted world in which women are no longer able to have children.

The unusually-articulate Ashitey was interviewed by Rolling Stone in February 2018. Reflecting back on 2016, she describes her state of being:

"By the end of 2016, I felt outnumbered by shitheads. . . . Between Trump’s election and Brexit, there were all sorts of opinions coming out of the woodwork that I thought had died out a long time ago," she says. "I was like, what's the point? All we do is bad things. The history of humanity is the history of people exploiting each other."

Coincidentally -- or perhaps through an intervention by the goddesses -- Clare-Hope Ashitey brought her frustrated fatalism to the act of finding her 'Seven Seconds' character, assistant prosecutor KJ Harper.

Influenced by the epidemic of police brutality that led to the deaths of black teenagers like Tamir Rice and Michael Brown (among too many others), the Jersey City-set 'Seven Seconds' explores a crime in Harper's own city -- the often-called sixth borough of New York City. In a story told against the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, her back "tellingly" turned towards them, Rolling Stone writes: "The cast is formidable, particularly Regina King as the victim’s bereft mother and Looking's Raul Castillo as one of the compromised narcotics officers. "A white cop and a black kid? Don’t you watch the news? There are no fucking accidents anymore," Castillo's character shouts at the rookie cop (Beau Knapp) who mowed the boy down – a justification so oft-repeated that it practically becomes a mantra."