Gotham Week Starts With Black-Led Projects About Basketball History and Bed-Stuy Displacement

Gotham Week begins Sunday, September 27, in Brooklyn with an 80-project Project Market that includes Black-led work about Southern basketball culture and the fight to preserve Bedford-Stuyvesant’s identity. The market runs through October 3 and connects filmmakers with financiers, distributors, production companies, sales agents, festival programmers and other industry decision-makers.

Two projects stand out for their direct connection to Black cultural geography. Basketball Heaven, directed by Resita Heavenly Cox and produced by Crystal Isaac, follows Cox’s return to Kinston, North Carolina, to investigate the people and history behind the town’s extraordinary record of producing NBA talent. The Gotham describes Kinston as the world’s largest producer of NBA talent, a claim tied to the project’s central premise rather than an independently established statistical ranking.

I Love Bed-Stuy, a Love Letter to Brooklyn, is directed by Sekiya Dorsett and produced by Afiya Williams and Okema T. Moore. The Gotham describes it as a hybrid documentary built around a queer fictional love story and the real-life fight to save Bedford-Stuyvesant from cultural extinction. The project’s framing makes neighborhood change part of the film’s form: fiction supplies the emotional spine while documentary material tracks residents’ struggle over memory, ownership and place.

The Project Market is not a finished-film showcase, and neither project has an announced financing, sales or distribution deal. That distinction matters. Gotham Week’s value here is access: selected filmmakers receive pre-scheduled meetings and networking opportunities with companies and institutions that can help move work from development toward production and release. The market has previously supported projects including Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny and Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight.

For independent creators, the stronger story is the specific kind of work entering the room. Basketball Heaven treats Black athletic history as a community archive rather than a highlight reel. I Love Bed-Stuy uses a neighborhood under pressure to ask who gets to define cultural continuity. Both projects are early, but their inclusion gives Gotham Week’s opening day a concrete Black-culture angle rather than a generic industry-event peg.