In 2003, eight Rhode Islanders created a secret apartment inside a busy mall and lived there for four years, filming everything along the way. Far more than a prank, the secret apartment became a deeply meaningful place for all involved.
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Came for the secret mall apartment, stayed for an unexpectedly wholesome story about a guy and tape.
Huge fun for those of us who think about testing all boundaries! I had the benefit of seeing this film followed by a Q&A with director Jeremy Workman this evening. This was a VERY funny and engaging movie that hit just the right notes over and over.
Mr. Workman clearly enjoyed the experience of making the documentary and marveled at the fact that even though the 8 apartment participants had filmed over 24 hours of their experience, nothing was ever done with the footage. I'm so glad that they got onboard and let him tell their story!
Michael Townsend, who initiated the process of living at the mall, is a guy that you want to be friends with. He is artistic and creative and is always thinking out of the box. Plus, I want to live at the (80s and 90s version of the) mall too, so I think we'd get along well. (read more here)
The way things are going, with my enemies in power and becoming increasingly brazenly anti-human by the minute, it feels like the youth culture of the future will have no other choice but to carve out some semblance of a livable world from the mouse holes and interstitial nooks of the investor class’ capitalist superstructures until every last potential consumer is living like rats, hidden inside the windowless liminal spaces between the walls of empty commercial citadels.
This is more of a study of artist Michael Townsend and his philosophy than a substantive unpacking of what exactly living illegally inside of a mall after losing your cherished spaces to gentrification and overdevelopment is like. There's something here that could've used…
I have been to this mall. I would not want to live there. Even as a grand artistic statement.
(I liked this.)
VIFF 2024 #1
This is an amusing doc about an art collective of sorts, led by Michael Townsend, that discovered a negative space within the confines of the Providence Place Mall and proceed to gradually build it up into a livable apartment space. I hearing about this story on a podcast (probably This American Life), and I was just super curious to finally put a visual to this story. It’s definitely entertaining. The secret mall apartment project functions here as more of a vehicle to bring awareness to the other works that Townsend and his fellows have worked on over the last decades. But there’s a lot of interesting discussion about what Art can be. It doesn’t necessarily be bound…
I don't think this is the film I thought it was going to be. It is not really a film about the apartment, about this strange commune living inside this unique space. Instead, it's a portrait of artistic genius Michael Townsend. The lengthy diversion into his artistic practice while everyone praises him makes him feel annoyingly godlike, almost a cult leader. His work is interesting, but I wish they'd asked him more about it, why did they not ask him about the tunnel project or discuss in detail the 9/11 one? What do they mean to him?
We're told frequently that Townsend believes that art is life and life is art. But I don't know if I'd call the mall…
guys i gotta come clean, I've been secretly living in The Capitol on Swanston St for the last 4 years of my life. One day I noticed I could take the elevator to the staff area and no one would question me and from that point on I've moved in and because nothing ever happens there I've managed to get away with it. I swear its commentary on gentrification and the possession of capital guys its totally art
We’re like barnacles on a whale.
unprecedented levels of "my shit" here, very much in line with the values and sensibilities of films that I've made and would want to make. temporal art within physical space, gathering people who are forever connected by the time they shared in a little heightened realm of their own making, bending the rules of an anti-human adult world to better serve whimsy and community. others have noted it, but more than anything, I was left feeling melancholic (and radicalized) by the realization that our social media generation has all-but abandoned truly embodied acts of playful creative community like this. people used to get together with their real-life friends in the real world and do things, ya know? and not for…
why did i cry when they all showed their keys
I love Providence, Rhode Island and all its lore with my whole heart.
Fun to see a movie and be like "there's my friend! Hey, that's my coworker! Hey, I am babysitting for his toddlers tomorrow!" the entire time
Watching a marriage unravel in the mall food court...
not being able to experience fort thunder in real life is actually going to haunt me forever
