By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 5 cats
Director: Jeremy Workman
Year: 2024
Running time: 91
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21221386/reference/
Brett says: “The title of the documentary SECRET MALL APARTMENT might appear to tell a person everything one needs to know, as four creative adults find an anomaly in the architecture of a local Providence mega-mall in the early 2000s and proceed to set up a residence in the untraversed catacombs of the facility. Equipped with absurdly poor recording devices in the form of a primitive digital camera, the experience is documented among the infiltrators, and voilà, all you need for a documentary is born, right? Not so fast.
“Director Jeremy Workman has a gift for making a simple concept like this into something much, much larger and profound. As it reads on paper, quirky shenanigans and disorder is all one might expect from such a group, especially as it expands from the original four inhabitants to four additional rebel hearts. However, given that the intruders are all artists in their own right, the content of this film all begins to take on a life of its own. With artistic visions at play at all times throughout the mall takeover, one can see clearly see that this is not just some kind of subversive game.
“The experience becomes a sense of longing for audience members, self-examining all the opportunities in one’s own life that could be filled with art and to add meaning to this short existence in the process of it all. Just like experiences with nearly any concept of memorable art–not just this one–the film experience here gives and gives, and a person soaks in all that one can in the moment, but the second that said art experience is over, there comes the feeling of an indescribable void. The great paradox in this is how many good examples of artistic experience creates something that fills a big intellectual space on one hand, but it actually creates an even bigger emptiness when it’s no longer available and present, thus offering a perspective that the creation of impermanent art is a type of reverse Big Bang. 5 CATS OUT OF 5
“Recommended for anyone who enjoys social experiment types of documentaries.
“Recommended for anyone who geeks out as much as this reviewer for the documentary THE INSTITUTE since there is a similar artistic, hard-to-pinpoint something present in all of this.”
Julie says: “Brett describes this film very well, so I will just add that along with this touching and profound shared group/audience experience of all things ephemeral, the editing of this film lends to some great laughs mixed in along the way.
“Michael Townsend, the main character of this film, is a true force. Jeremy Workman is a fantastic doc directory known for his digging into subjects which resulted in this wonderful documentary that won the Grand Jury award at Boston IFF.
“I stayed for the q & a and found it interesting that while there have been over 30 film directors that have contacted the group about their story it wasn’t until a random meeting with Jeremy Workman who first discovered Mike via his tape art, that Mike showed him some of the videos he’d filmed. Jeremy was the only film maker interested in telling the entire story, so Mike agreed.
“I asked at the q&a and found out that once the mall closed (with the movie theater open till 3 am) they did not venture out of the space for fear of being caught so had 5 or 6 hours that they needed to commit to being in the 750 square foot apartment (with no running water or bathroom). I asked one of the girls who was there who I ran into after the film, what she thought of that and she said, oh I never stayed over night! Yeah I get that!
“They did a little give away and gave out 2 keys ‘to nowhere’ to the first correct answers to their two trivia questions about the movie. Darn I wanted one of those keys so badly! 5 out of 5 enthusiastic cats”