In a kinetic ode to New York City’s underground street culture, director Dominic Lahiff lenses the Bed Stuy Veterans and the broken dance that transforms mental and physical pain into a charged state of movement for short film Bruk Up!.

A dance style coined by George Adams in Kingston, Jamaica, Bruk Up evolved through the pioneering Bed Stuy Veterans’ expansion of its origins, incorporating elements of body popping, hip hop and dancehall as an outlet for traumas carried from the streets of early 2000s Brooklyn. An act of resistance in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, the Bed Stuy Veterans’ dance and annual BBQ unites its founding members in a celebration of the art form, finding beauty in fragments of their broken inner selves against a changing landscape which no longer has space for them.

“I chose to shoot on 16mm film stock and use minimal lighting to create the type of painterly street photography best suited to reflect this street art form – using strobing lights, rhythmic edits, a ragga dub infused soundtrack, gunshots, police sirens. These elements express Bed Stuy Veterans’ ability to turn pain into beauty, to draw on their personal histories to create something timeless and true.”

Capturing one of the last remaining pillars of old Bed Stuy, Lahiff shot Bruk Up! on 16mm film outside the iconic Slaughterhouse building – featuring the UK’s first Bruk Up dancer Jamal Sterrett and Albert ‘The Ghost’ Esquilin, among other faces from the scene. Between strobing, sirens and a ragga dub soundtrack, Bruk Up! amplifies the Bed Stuy Veterans’ roots, and the experiences that underscore its community, upholding the continuation of an art form born from economic hardship and limited avenues of expression.