VIFF 2024 | Artistic Trespassing – How to Build a 'Secret Mall Apartment'

"When I come back, you better be out!"

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2024—Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker Jeremy Workman chronicles artist Michael Townsend's hilarious early-2000s experiment taking control of an unknown space in the Providence Place Mall in Rhode Island. As its title straightforwardly implies, Secret Mall Apartment provides all the side-splitting details about how eight friends (all working artists) dared to build a makeshift home in a four-year-long act of trespassing.

What happened for Townsend and his friends to set up a hidden living quarter within the mall's parking garage is fairly obvious in its audacious brazenness. How the backstory of artists advocating for public spaces, affordable housing, and public art unfolds is much more special.

Recounting Providence's political shift twenty years ago against the eastside of town, Workman explores issues of gentrification, arts funding, and urban renewal as they relate to his well-meaning documentary subjects who were all young activists or teachers at the time, many of whom were evicted from their homes in the name of urban development after the mall was built nearby.

There's so much heartfelt wonder and slice-of-life storytelling to Secret Mall Apartment's engaging true story that sometimes mirrors itself as a low-level crime heist doubling as performance art. It's easily one of the best subjects for a human interest documentary seen in a long time and a true case for the positive impact of accessible art for everyone.

Secret Mall Apartment screened at the 2024 Vancouver International Film Festival as part of the Showcase series.


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