Shops Around the Corner

"They don´t like certain questions." This appears to be an unwritten code here in Little Italy where the owner of a tobacco shop is a self-described outsider from New Jersey. Nonetheless, questions posed in Shops Around the Corner are the means to an end for the filmmaker Jörg Kalt: you only get answers if you try to find something out.

In 1998, Kalt and cameraperson Eva Testor stood at the intersection of Mulberry and Grand every morning - at the exact boundary between Little Italy and Chinatown. They had come to New York for two weeks spontaneously to shoot two...