The Cigar Shop
In 1974 Dominican immigrant Don Antonio Martinez opened a small cigar shop in New York City, hand-rolling cigars for a neighborhood clientele. Thirty-eight years later his son Jesus runs the same counter, and the film follows him through the daily work of keeping the shop going: selecting tobacco, rolling by hand, and talking with longtime customers who have been coming in for decades. Interviews with Jesus and the people around the shop trace what changed in the neighborhood and the business since his father's day, and what stayed the same. The camera lingers on the small physical details of the trade, the tools, the leaves, the worn shop counter, that make the case for cigar rolling as a craft passed hand to hand rather than a factory process. It is a short, quiet portrait of immigrant labor and inheritance, built around one family and one storefront rather than the industry at large.