Taylor Hosking’s debut documentary, *West Side Familia*, will open the 15th BlackStar Film Festival next week. The 75-minute film follows La West Side Familia, a Puerto Rican-led biker gang and community group on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, using its members’ lives to examine the city’s changing social and cultural history. It matters because the film highlights a little-known community’s role in preserving Puerto Rican identity amid decades of gentrification.

The project began after Hosking noticed members displaying Puerto Rican flags during parade season and interviewed the group’s central figure, Chino. Chino recounts involvement with the Black Panthers, Young Lords, squatters’ rights activism and a 1977 protest in which Young Lords raised the Puerto Rican flag on the Statue of Liberty; the image was recently referenced by Bad Bunny. Hosking combines these interviews with her own narration, contrasting her upbringing in the same neighbourhood with the different racial and economic conditions created by gentrification.