New Haven's Little Italy Film & Talk at Milford Library on January 5

 The Village: Life in New Haven’s Little Italy Film and talk-back at Milford Library on January 5 (snow date January 19) at 2 pm

Milford Library is pleased to host a screening of The Village: Life in New Haven’s Little Italy on January 5 at 2pm. (Snow date is January 19). The film tells the story of the city’s Wooster Square neighborhood, which for many years was a tight-knit Italian-American enclave. Using oral history interviews, photos from family albums, and historic films and photographs, the documentary explores the power of ethnic identity and reaffirms the importance of immigration to American society. Today, few descendants of the immigrants still live in Wooster Square, but vestiges of their community remain—in the church, the ethnic societies and their festas, and the pizza joints and pastry shops. Most vividly, the village lives on in the fond memories of the people who grew up there.

The film's director, Steve Hamm, is a freelance writer and documentary film maker living on New Haven's Wooster Square. He was a journalist for many years, working for the likes of BusinessWeek magazine and the San Jose Mercury News. Later he worked for IBM and Yale School of Medicine as a writer and editor. He is the author or co-author of four books, most recently Smart Machines, about the revolution in artificial intelligence. Steve has made a number of short films, some of which have been published on the Web sites of the New Haven Register and the New Haven Independent. Most of his films are community-building projects; he does the work on a pro bono basis.