Gentrification: The movie.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: 'Class Divide' - Briefly Noted - Movie review - Brief article

On one side of 10th Avenue in lower Manhattan is the almost comically upscale Avenues school, where students learn Mandarin for $40,000 a year. Just 115 steps away on the other side are the Chelsea-Elliott housing projects.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Cue drool overthe insane perfection of the metaphor by gentrification documentarians Marc Levin and Daphne Pinkerson. Their resulting film, Class Divide, airs on HBO on October 3.

Asking kids to parrot the necessary cliches about race, class, and mobility is a high-risk strategy. This out-of-the-mouths-of-babes tactic can go terribly wrong in unskilled hands. What saves the piece...