The Bronx Filmmakers Collective
Established 2012

In 1931, Jay Leyda made A Bronx Morning, a city symphony—something we would now label as experimental film—built around the working-class people of the Bronx and the rhythms of an ordinary morning. Leyda deliberately chose a place he described as neither “exotic nor romantic” and “untouched by a movie camera,” rather than the grandiosity of Manhattan. This little film about the Bronx earned Leyda a place in Sergei Eisenstein’s directing course at the Moscow State Film School. Eisenstein—the greatest filmmaker in the world at the time, and still the most influential filmmaker in the history of cinema—would later take Leyda on as an assistant on several films. Leyda was part of New York’s Workers Film and Photo League, part of an international movement that understood film as an art form, but also as part of a collective effort to build a better world. He was also involved with Nykino, a radical documentary filmmaking collective, and Frontier Films, the first nonprofit documentary production company in the United States. Atelier Leyda takes its name from that encounter: a camera, the Bronx, a collective of filmmakers, and another way of making cinema.