The year 1969 was a heady time for childhood friends Joel Sucher and Steven Fischler, who scraped together the $175-a-month rent for a Brooklyn loft in which to open their Pacific Street Films collective. Before forming the company, the pals from Sheepshead Bay, who became enamored with anarchism during their wonder years at Brooklyn Tech high school, had entered NYU as highly politicized students. They quickly wearied of Students for a Democratic Society, which seemed more concerned with theory than with practice, and formed their own splinter radical-politics club. While creating a film record of their group's meetings, Sucher and Fischler realized how much they enjoyed the documentary process, and the pair transferred from the liberal-arts department to the film school. They studied under an antic professor with long, greasy hair named Martin Scorsese, whose staccato lectures sounded like a hundred fire bells. And they met fellow student Oliver Stone, who lurked quietly in the back of the class, all but dissolving when he wasn't showing his movies. Sucher and Fischler graduated at age 20, and moved to their Brooklyn workspace to direct and produce socially relevant chronicles.

"We were totally naive," says Sucher, by phone from the company's current, leafier location in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. "We had no business savvy. I'm currently writing a script about that period called Film School." Regardless of their initial lack of business acumen, the company has fulfilled its goals for three and a half decades. Starting this week, the duo's best work will be presented in "Pacific Street Films: The 35th Anniversary" at MoMA.

Pacific Street's first notable success was 1971's Red Squad, a ballsy countersurveillance chronicle in which the duo documents NYPD officers who filmed antiwar demonstrations. "I Promise to Remember: The Story of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers" (1983) examines the fleeting success of a charismatic '50s doo-wop singer, in the era when so-called race music became simply popular music. In Free Voices of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists (1980), a radical Yiddish newspaper's demise inspires a study of the history of Jewish political dissent. From Swastika to Jim Crow (2000) is the story of how Jewish scholars who fled Nazism in Europe became professors at black colleges in the American South.

When asked how Pacific Street has managed to survive, Sucher answers in his matter-of-fact style. "Let's just say I'm thankful for credit cards," the filmmaker admits. "It's very difficult, but you have to make a decision whether you're going to pursue what you feel is your destiny or if you're gonna sell out."

"Pacific Street Films: The 35th Anniversary" plays at MoMA from Friday 19 through Wednesday 24.