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"This Time Next Year," a documentary about Hurricane Sandy recovery in Long Beach Island, will screen at the Tribeca Film Festival this month.
("This Time Next Year")
Two months after Hurricane Sandy touched down on the East Coast, Jeff Reichert said the focus on storm recovery in a community “very deeply woven into the fabric” of his family had already dwindled.
If Long Beach Island had already dropped off the radar at that point, Reichert, a New Jersey native and filmmaker, recalled asking himself, “What’s next November going to be like?”
So Reichert and his wife Farihah Zaman set out to document a year of post-Sandy rebuilding on and around the 18-mile-long southern Ocean County barrier island. The result — “This Time Next Year” — will show at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City later this month.
Reichert, who grew up in Northfield, said the film follows a handful of families working to piece their lives, and the lives of their neighbors, back together from Sandy while fighting with insurance companies, waiting for state and federal aid and wrangling with contractors.
Joe Mangino, a 44-year-old resident of the Beach Haven West section of Stafford Township, is among the people featured in the documentary.
As he worked to repair his own flood-damaged property, Mangino co-founded a grassroots group called Stafford Teachers And Residents Together or S.T.A.R.T. that coordinated thousands of volunteers to help with cleanup efforts.
“I never expected to do anything like this,” Mangino said. But, “all of sudden, this happens. Who is going to step up and do something?”
People like him.
While documentaries often focus on extraordinary cases, Reichert said “our movie is about people who would be classified as quote-unquote regular.”
But, he said, those people are extraordinary and he hopes the film inspires viewers by showing a community that “pulled it back together in the face of something that is really, really terrible.”
The documentary, which Reichert and Zaman directed together, was funded through a first-time collaboration between the Tribeca Film Institute and The Rockefeller Foundation.
Ryan Harrington, the film institute’s vice president of artist programs, said his group had been working with The Rockefeller Foundation to find the right project to fund for “The Resilient Communities Project” when “This Time Next Year” came along.
After Harrington saw some scenes from the documentary, he said he knew he had the right film.
“It’s really just a beacon of what human will and what human good is,” he said.
The funding extends beyond producing the film itself.
Harrington said the film institute is developing an educational curriculum that will show teachers how they can use “This Time Next Year” to teach about disaster preparation.
Neill Coleman, vice president of global communications for The Rockefeller Foundation, said “This Time Next Year” fit in with the nonprofit group’s work in helping communities build resilience.
“What the film, I think, really shows is how important that those networks, friendships, associations within a community are,” he said. Those connections, he said, are vital “in order to be able to rebuild but also to prepare for future such events.”
The documentary starts near Christmas 2012. By the time filming concluded about a year later, Reichert — whose parents met in Long Beach Island and who got engaged to Zaman on the island — said the majority of people had completed the major repairs on their homes.
But there’s still work to be done. Mangino moved home after being displaced for months, but he said, “We are going to have to move back out because we still have to raise our house.”
A free community screening of “This Time Next Year” will be held at 6 p.m. on April 23 at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island.
The documentary will show twice at the Tribeca Film Festival at 9:30 p.m. on April 25 and at 6 p.m. on April 26.
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