Secret Mall Apartment, the 2024 documentary film recounting the story of several artists who secretly lived inside a Providence mall for four years, released on Netflix Friday.
Originally released in theaters in last March, becoming one of the year’s hit documentaries, the film has since been available for rental on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV. However, as is often the case when a film or television series hits Netflix, the documentary is sure to reach a whole new level of audience.
Secret Mall Apartment, directed by Jeremy Workman, follows Michael Townsend, an adjunct professor and drawing instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2003, Townsend and seven others, many of whom were his former students in RISD’s summer program, covertly built an apartment hidden inside the Providence Place mall as a kind of protest against gentrification, consumer culture, and the mall’s encroachment on Eagle Square, a deindustrialized neighborhood popoular for artists in the early 2000s.
The group lived in the mall for up to three weeks at a time over the course of four years, often documenting their life on small digital cameras. In 2007, the apartment was discovered, and Townsend was eventually charged with trespassing. He was sentenced to probation that October and banned from the mall for life.
The documentary, like the art project from which it sprung, is a strange and funny exploration of the often blurry line between art and life. As Alissa Wilkinson wrote in her review for the New York Times, the film “makes a compelling case that the project reverberates through the lives of the artists, and maybe even the city, to this day.”
Have a look at the trailer below, and watch the film here:
