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The new documentary "At Home in Utopia" tells the story of the United Workers Co-operative Colony, dubbed by its resident owners as "the Co-ops" -- one of four co-operative housing experiments in the Bronx in the 1920s. Many of the founding residents were ardent Communists who lived their politics at home as well as at work.

For producer, writer, and editor Michal Goldman, who came of age during the civil rights and women's movements of the 1960s, doing this film made a lot of sense. "I am very interested in radicalism and in how people's ideas and ideals actually get lived out," she explained, "what happens when people take a set of ideals and try to put them into practice. And this was a chance to look at that within my own turf."

Although Goldman's own family in Boston was liberal, not radical, she was fascinated by the idea of looking at the process of social change and dialogue within a specific community. "I am interested in how what you think can actually transform the way things are," she said. "It never works out the way you predict. People have a grand program for all they want to change and are faced with a very complex reality, a series of interlocking positions. You are faced with the vagaries of human nature including your own."

The idea for the film came from Andrew Hazleton, an architect who had taught the history of the four Bronx housing co-operatives in a class on affordable urban housing. "The response of his students made him realize there was a film here," said Goldman. After the film was rejected by aspiring filmmaker Ellen Brodsky, a fellow parent in the co-operative nursery his children attended, on the grounds of inexperience, it landed in Goldman's hands. Brodsky ended up joining her as co-producer.

Research for the film involved interviews with well over 100 people, 90 of whom had grown up in the Co-ops. These colorful characters captured the essence of a history defined by a mixture of poverty and idealism. Boris Ourlicht, for example, joined the Communist party as a young man and married a black woman he met in the Co-ops; in the film he tells the story of how, on their first date, they were brought into a police station -- for the crime of being an interracial couple.

Using, in addition to the interviews, archival materials, home movies, and ephemera that former residents sent, like report cards, membership cards, and co-op share certificates, the film focuses on the rise and fall of the Co-ops as co-operative housing for workers. The Co-ops were built in open land next to the Bronx Park, and the courtyard was planted with its own trees and gardens.

For Goldman, editing the mass of material she uncovered was particularly challenging. Unusual for a filmmaker, she edits her own work, and being so close to her material has advantages and disadvantages. "On the one hand, it allows me to make all sorts of wonderful discoveries, because my hands are really in it," she said. "On the other hand, you can lose perspective really fast."

To help her figure out what did and did not belong in the film, Goldman showed the film at various points to small groups, particularly fellow filmmakers who knew how to look at rough cuts. What helped Goldman most shaping the film was the advice of an experienced director and editor, Peter Rhodes, a British Jew whose wife sings in a Workmen's Circle chorus in Boston. He agreed to become her consulting editor.

"I had gotten stuck, and there were some things I couldn't give up," she recalled. "He pushed me off that rock." The two met every week or so, after Rhodes was done with work, to view and talk through a chunk of film. "He would be very strict about what would and would not work," she said. "It became a wonderful dialogue with another person and much more fun."

Two things were important to Goldman to include in the film, and she did not give up on them. First was a sense of the buildings and their residents today. "I didn't want the viewer to wonder whether the buildings still stood, whether people were still living in them," she said. "It seemed parochial in a way to assume that the only interesting story was the story of the Jewish occupation of this place. I wanted to at least signal that there are lots of stories to tell about this building -- it's just that I have chosen this one."

Goldman also wanted to include a segment about the Amalgamated Co-operative Houses, which to this day are a flourishing co-operative. "I didn't want people to think this was all a hopeless dream," she said. "The Amalgamated pulled them off, and I wanted people to understand that this can work." The architect Daniel Libeskind, who moved into the Amalgamated as an adolescent when his family came to America as survivors of the Holocaust, speaks about his experience in the film.

Goldman's work as a film editor began with "Black Natchez," which documented the campaign of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to register blacks to vote in the South. Thinking back to that time, when she was an assistant film editor, she said, "I believed that documentary films could really open people up to new ideas, new ways of thinking about things and seeing things." After years in the film business and in life, she has tempered her young naïveté a bit, realizing that people form understandings in more complex ways.

Goldman's training in film editing led her to the editing room of "The Exorcist," as well as other feature films in New York and Los Angeles. The first film she did on her own, "A Jumpin' Night in the Garden of Eden," completed in 1986, documented the revival of klezmer music by profiling two early bands, the larger Klezmer Conservatory Band in Boston, with its big band sound, and the smaller Kapplye in New York, with its old world tones. How did she learn about klezmer music? "My sister had the audacity to get married using a band playing a kind of music I had never heard of," she said. "I didn't think there was anything Jewish that she would know about that I didn't know about."

Her next film grew out of her immersion in Arab culture when she followed a boyfriend to Cairo, where she lived for a year-and-a-half. The film, "Umm Kulthum, A Voice Like Egypt," was about the great diva of Arabic song. "Making a film about her was a chance to give Americans a kind of entry point into the Middle East that was not framed by the Arab-Israeli conflict," she said. Kulthum's music, she explained, "is very much about anti-colonialism and finding a way to be modern, and that music could do that. Music, when it is very popular and when everybody listens to it, could come to stand for a kind of national identity."

Her third film, "Epiphany in Progress" took on yet another religion but also confronted the problems of the inner city. It documented the first year of a tiny Christian school in Boston, founded by young Episcopolians that covered all fees for the inner-city middle-school children it served. "I was really curious to see what would happen when their idealism hit the road, when this got real," said Goldman.

The DVD of Goldman's new film, "At Home in Utopia," may be purchased for home use at filmmakerscollab.org/films/at-home-in-utopia and for organizational and educational use at www.newday.com/films/athomeinutopia.html.