The Village: Life in New Haven’s Little Italy

The Village: Life in New Haven’s Little Italy, 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.

DIRECTOR: STEVE HAMM

EDITOR: SCOTT N. AMORE

a 60-minute documentary about the Italian-American experience in New Haven's Wooster Square neighborhood. The film premiered in June at the New Haven Documentary Film Festival, has been screened a number of times in New Haven since then, and is now being shown at libraries in towns around New Haven, where many Wooster Square people moved over the past several decades.