...around part of the Borough of Queens known as Jackson Heights. In Queens cthis is called a neighborhood and the actual boundaries are imprecise. In Jackson Heights, there are167 languages, and communities of people from every country in South and Central America as well as large groups of people from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Nepal and Tibet. They live together with the descendants of earlier immigrations to America-Italian, Jewish and Irish. The area is a true American "melting pot" reminiscent of the Lower East Side of New York City at the end of the 19th century.

The shooting method was to walk around filming events in the street, going into businesses (stores, laundromats, bakeries, restaurants, supermarkets), religious institutions (mosques, temples, churches) and collecting 120 hours of sequences and shots. When I began I had no idea what the themes, point of view or length would be.

The film emerged from nine weeks of shooting and ten months of editing. In the editing there is a four way conversation going on between (1) my memory of the place; (2) the record of that memory as retained in the rushes; (3) my general experience and (4) the editing process where I try to understand what is going on in an individual sequence, choose and edit the material I want to use and discover visual and thematic connections between sequences. The film finds a form in that conversation and represents what I learned from the experience of making the film."

• Frederick Wiseman

Since 1967, Frederick Wiseman has directed 43 documentaries—dramatic, narrative films that seek to portray ordinary human experience in a wide variety of contemporary social institutions. His films include TITICUT FOLLIES, HIGH SCHOOL, WELFARE, JUVENILE COURT, BOXING GYM, BALLET, LA DANSE, CENTRAL PARK, and CRAZY HORSE.

Wiseman's work has been distributed in theatres and broadcast on television in many countries by his Cambridge, MA company, Zipporah Films www.zipporah.com