Tendaberry

Haley Elizabeth Anderson’s debut TENDABERRY dives into the life, mind, and spirit of Dakota, a twentysomething Dominican American woman finding her footing in South Brooklyn. Dakota falls fast in love with Yur, an adoring Ukrainian boy in Coney Island, but their idyll is disrupted when a family sickness sends him back home—a trip that continues indefinitely when war comes to Ukraine. What follow are days, nights, weeks, and seasons of wage labour, street encounters, misbehaviour and loneliness, and the constancy of change, a theme underscored by a narrative that shifts, zigs, and zags, even incorporates archival footage made by artist Nelson Sullivan documenting New York’s queer and nightlife scenes of the 1980s. Anderson’s understanding of young adulthood in the big city is intimate and wise, as is her incantation of the Brooklyn of street corners, subway stops, dive bars, grimy apartments, and the bruised beauty of Coney Island. (kw)