‘Secret Mall Apartment’ Review: Offbeat SXSW Doc Is a Nice Place to Visit, but You Wouldn’t Want to Live There
20.03.2024 - 19:33
/ variety.com
Michael Nordine Some solutions to the housing crisis are more creative than others. For a group of artists in Providence, Rhode Island, that idea was put to the test when they infiltrated and inhabited a hidden alcove in their local mall for four years — a symbol of gentrification they repurposed into a decidedly anticapitalist communal space.
The aptly named “Secret Mall Apartment,” directed by Jeremy Workman and executive produced by Jesse Eisenberg, is a thoughtful celebration of the DIY artistry behind that experiment, but only a so-so investigation of it. Like a lot of great plans, this one was barely planned at all.
After he and three of his friends decided to see who could pull off living inside Providence Place Mall the longest, Michael Townsend, drawing on a random memory of the building’s construction four years earlier, recalled a “nowhere space” where he and his cohort might find shelter: a tucked-away “anomaly in the architecture” that had clearly been empty for the entirety of the building’s existence. What was good enough for one night ended up being good enough for several, and four years later they were still there — until they weren’t.
That these events took place in this specific mall was no coincidence. The Providence Place Mall opened in 1999 as part of an effort to revitalize the city’s economic activity, but many residents felt it wasn’t for them; some even noted its exact placement as a kind of dividing line between Providence’s upscale and undesirable neighborhoods.
The space itself, a windowless annex with cinderblock walls, gives the impression of a low-budget sitcom set in its ramshackle construction, somehow cozy and cold all at once. Taking up residence inside Providence Place wasn’t a
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