Director

Fanny Texier

Fanny Texier is an award-winning documentary filmmaker born in Paris and based in Brooklyn. Specializing in vérité filmmaking, her experience as an editor deeply informs how she frames her cinematography: it’s her superpower. Fanny has worked for outlets including The New Yorker, BBC, VICE News, The New York Post, AJ+, HBO, Netflix, VICE on Showtime, BET.

Director’s  statement

As a Williamsburg resident and close friend of Emilija and Ona, I came to know their home — one of the last original artist lofts in the neighborhood — as an iconic community space and a rare relic of New York City’s past.

When their mother passed away in 2021, and the twins received an eviction notice, they invited me to document their lives in the space that had shaped them, not knowing how much longer they had left there. When Ona became pregnant, grieving her mother while preparing to become one herself, the emotional stakes of their story deepened in powerful and unexpected ways.

In crafting this documentary, I took a vérité, fly-on-the-wall approach to capture the sisters’ raw and unfiltered experience of grief, motherhood, and sisterhood. At the same time, I followed the eviction legal process, tracing the contours of a larger story about the erasure of working-class communities in Williamsburg and across New York City.

By immersing the viewer in the sisters’ world, I hope to provoke reflection and dialogue on broader issues of gentrification, and the importance of preserving community ties.

— Fanny Texier