Throughout his career, which spans nearly six decades, Frederick Wiseman has ventured into major social institutions. Psychiatric hospitals, high schools, the military, and social services, as well as cultural ones: the Comédie-Française, the Paris Opera, and the National Gallery in London. In IN JACKSON HEIGHTS, he turns his attention to an entire neighborhood: one of New York’s most diverse, where over 160 languages are spoken.

Beneath the elevated train, shops selling whole goats line up next to sari fabrics and Bollywood DVDs; HIV tests sit alongside Tibetan food; and classes for aspiring taxi drivers are held next to prayer rooms. Jackson Heights is home to an active LGBT community, a refuge for people who have made life-threatening border crossings, and the setting for small shop owners who are organizing against the looming displacement of their neighborhood. Wiseman, as always working without narration, music, or interviews, weaves all of this into a mosaic and makes the neighborhood itself the true protagonist of his film.

Laura Morcillo focuses her observations on Werderplatz, watching as goods change hands for money and the losers of the big system sit around the marketplace, under the suspicious gaze of the marketplace guards.

The film was made in 2010 as part of Thomas Heise's series of observations, which was designed to train the observational eye as an introduction to documentary film studies. It was shot over a longer period of time at the well-known Werderplatz in Karlsruhe's Südstadt district. In 2014, four years later, Laura Morcillo returns to Werderplatz in her short film Lettre de Werderplatz.