The neighborhood was featured way more prominently in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 The Wrong Man. The movie poster claimed that “every twist and turn of it is true!” and indeed it was the first time the director turned to real-life as the basis for one of his films. And for the sake of authenticity, most of the its interiors and exteriors were shot on location in Jackson Heights, the place where Henry Fonda’s character Manny Balestrero resides with his wife and two children, at 40-24 78th Street. He is a jazz bass player at NYC’s Stork Club, as honest as they come, who becomes trapped in a cruel cycle of injustice when he’s falsely accused of armed robbery. So not only do we see Jackson Heights, but we hear it said multiple times as Manny is repeatedly asked to state his name and address while being questioned by lawyers and the police. His plight is a storied one in his town, and in 2014, the border intersection of Woodside, Elmhurst, and Jackson Heights at 73rd St. and 41st Avenue was re-named Manny “The Wrong Man” Balestrero Way in his honor.

Following Hitchcock’s underappreciated masterpiece, it would take nearly 50 years for the neighborhood to be given a screen role as large. In Joshua Marston’s Maria Full of Grace (2004), a 17-year-old girl in Colombia, who’s just discovered she’s pregnant, spends the sometimes unbearably intense beginning of the film preparing for the dangerous mission of transporting heroin capsules to New York, a city she arrives into just about an hour into the film. And once there, much of the action takes place on the streets and in local businesses of Jackson Heights. As she wanders the neighborhood and buys obleas (wafers) from local vendors, we are seeing it from the perspective of her fresh eyes, a heartbreaking experience thanks to the striking debut performance of Catalina Sandino Moreno as Maria.