Joana Avillez, Susan Orlean, Josh Safdie, Alex Vadukul, and Scott Schomburg: Joseph Mitchell’s NYC

The Oscar-nominated director of Marty Supreme and Uncut Gems, Josh Safdie, joins illustrator Joana Avillez, along with renowned journalists Susan Orlean and Alex Vadukul, and Mitchell biographer, Scott Schomburg, for a conversation about the lost underworld of old New York and its greatest bard, legendary journalist Joseph Mitchell — a celebration of the new edition of Mitchell’s classic collection, The Bottom of the Harbor.

Before New York City was a brand, it was a cacophony of voices — and few were better at capturing them than Joseph Mitchell. First published in 1959, Mitchell’s portraits of dockworkers, barflies, street preachers, and neighborhood lifers read like a field guide to a city always on the brink of reinvention. Safdie, whose films thrive on the electricity of real people in a real New York, traces a direct line from Mitchell’s obsessive attention to marginal lives to his work in Marty Supreme and Uncut Gems, where the city’s overlooked corners become the story itself.

Don’t miss a Safdie-curated gateway to Mitchell’s world as he and Avillez discuss their work on the new edition of The Bottom of the Harbor with Vadukul, Orlean, and Schomburg. Come rediscover a foundational chronicler of NYC — and see the city’s eccentrics, obsessives, and hidden worlds anew.

“Joseph Mitchell turns over rocks and prods the roly polys with his pen in the most sensitive way possible. The result is one of the greatest portraits of New York City and the lost beautiful souls who inhabit it.” — Josh Safdie, writer and director of Uncut Gems and Marty Supreme