A new documentary screening at the Milwaukee Film Festival explores the city's historic Brady Street neighborhood from its earliest roots, its eras of immigration, to the present day.
Brady Street: Portrait of a Neighborhood was made over the course of two years by more than 80 UW-Milwaukee film students and directed by Sean Kafer, the program director of doc|UWM.
Kafer spoke with Lake Effect’s Xcaret Nuñez about the making of the film.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
In this documentary, the story of Brady Street is told through historians, neighborhood residents and various business owners in the area. How did you and your students build out the blueprint of where to start with Brady Street’s story and who the sources would be?
We started off with Frank Alioto, who’s a historian and wrote a book about the neighborhood, and from there we asked him who to talk to. So we reached out to other people and we kind of kept letting it grow further and further… we didn't have a blueprint, and going into it, we knew that we didn't, but there were some important people that were given to us through [The Brady Street Business Improvement District] also. So I think my favorite part about it is that it grew organically without a game plan going into it.
In the documentary, you focus on various immigrant communities at different points in Milwaukee's history, including Polish immigrants. It was interesting to learn how they built foundational parts of the city. Can you talk about the early Polish era in the Brady Street area?
The Polish population came when the tanneries came. So a number of tanneries are lined up on the river, where we see apartment houses and condos now, and at the time, the cheap labor was the Polish immigrant, but that was the group at that time period that you could pay less, and they would work in the leather industry there. And how they came and built their houses was that they took a lot of recycled materials from different parts of town, brought it over, and eventually created a really small house. Then maybe you'd build up and put brick around the bottom, and that would be your Polish flat that we now know today. Instead of having a backyard, they might put another house in the back, and maybe that was the parent's house or another family member's place. So it's a very condensed neighborhood with all of its Polish flats… and as more funds were collected, [Polish immigrants] built the beautiful St. Hedwig church. Before that, Frank Alioto shares with us that [Polish immigrants] would make a pilgrimage all the way down to the South Side… which they were walking to, so that's like maybe four or five miles, but doing that every Sunday [to go to church] is a pilgrimage… so it was essential for them to build this, and it's now kind of the center of the street.
Someone who ties the whole story together for me is Mark Denning, who is enrolled with the Oneida tribe of Wisconsin, and a cultural speaker and educator with UW-Milwaukee. Can you talk about how he establishes the evolution of Brady Street?
I think he's essential to the film, because we often think of our history as just European settlers coming in, but we have to remember that there were people here for tens of thousands of years before that. And he reminds us of how different native tribes would use and connect to the land and the water, and how important it was… because we have this confluence of three rivers where trade, agriculture and fishing can all happen. So he brings it together and gives us a beginning of what it was like. And I don't want to say too much about the end, but I'll say that he gives a positive outlook for Milwaukee, the rivers and the environment.
This was a long-running project in the making for you and your students. What do you think the more than 80 students who worked on production took away from making this documentary?
First off, they got to learn how to be on a real production. And for many of them, if not all of them, this might be their first real big-time production that they're doing. So getting to work together, but then also becoming part of the neighborhood. A lot of our students at UW-Milwaukee, we have a very rich and diverse student body, and many of them come from places that are maybe not as condensed and urban as this. So getting into these neighborhoods and feeling these connections, I could see it in the students — in their face and in their eyes and in their smile that they're connecting with the community, and they liked it.
You can see the premiere of “Brady Street: Portrait of a Neighborhood” on Friday, May 2, at 3:30 p.m. at the Oriental Theatre. The documentary will also be shown on Sunday, May 4, at 12:30 p.m. and Wednesday, May 7, at 8:30 p.m. at the Downer Theatre. Each showing will be followed by a Q&A with Kafer and some student producers for this documentary.
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