PRESS

LOGLINE

After serving a four-year federal prison sentence, a former gang leader returns to his street corner to find his crew replaced by a more violent generation — and must confront the murder of his teenage son and rebuild in a city transformed beyond recognition.

SYNOPSIS

First & Lander: Newburgh's Dark Side follows Terence "Tee Rexx" West Sr., the former leader of Da Original Dark Side — once the most notorious street crew in Newburgh, New York. Told largely in his own words, the film traces the crew's rise at the corner of First & Lander, the April 2000 federal raid that dismantled it, and West's return home from prison to a city reshaped by the violence that filled the void he left behind.

It is also the story of a father. In 2015, West's sixteen-year-old son was murdered — a loss that became the reason he now tells this story at all. Around him, Newburgh itself becomes the film's second subject: a small Hudson Valley city that was once named an All-American City, then hollowed out by decades of urban renewal and disinvestment. Made with its subject rather than about him, the film is less a crime story than a portrait of grief, accountability, and what it takes to keep loving a place that keeps taking from you.