Third Avenue: Only the Strong Survive

Winner of the National Emmy®, this milestone cinema-verité documentary tells the stories of six "ordinary" people who live or work along New York City's Third Avenue, which runs for sixteen miles through Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, cutting through the complex social strata of the city to reveal wildly different economic and ethnic subcultures. 

The subjects speak for themselves, offering candid glimpses into the disparate worlds of a junkyard dealer who steals cars, a Bowery bum and the wife he abandoned, a welfare mother living in a burnt-out building with her five children, a male prostitute, a God-fearing Puerto Rican factory worker, and an aging Italian barber and his wife.

Calling it "a triumph of its kind and a guidepost to a new age of television," The Washington Post raved, "This program is essentially about whatever it is that makes people stand up and curse and dare anybody to trample them again." 


Quotes:

"There is more drama, more life, more love and passion in this short hour than in a week's worth of prime-time pot boiling." — The Washington Post

"Once in a while there comes a television program so unique, so arresting, that it stops the viewer short.  Third Avenue: Only the Strong Survive is one such program." — Detroit News


Awards:

News and Documentary Emmy® Award
Grand Prize, Tokyo Video Festival

Credits:

Producer/Directors: Keiko Tsuno, Jon Alpert
Associate Producers: Victor Sanchez, Karen Ranucci, Eddie Pabon, Maryann DeLeo, Kathii Chen
Editor: Keiko Tsuno
Music: Jerry Butler

Technical Details:

1980, trt 58 min, color,