Several years ago I had the pleasure of viewing the film Radiant City at the Uptown Stage & Screen. Sufficed to say, it completely transformed the way I viewed what could be termed the “sprawl problem” facing the majority of our North American cities today. I had never approached the problem of the suburbs–even though I spent some of my formative years in that suburban oasis called Sundance–from a psychological perspective.
This film does that in documentary style (produced by CBC Calgary’s Jim Brown). It’s so eerily similar to my experience, though maybe it’s mostly the fact that the film is set in a neigborhood directly beside the one I grew up in. The family has finally taken the plunge and set up shop, so to speak, in Calgary’s suburbs in a “family oriented development.” Interspersed between scenes of the family are some experts on sustainable design, livable neighborhoods, and everyone’s favorite peak-oil novelist and polemicist James Howard Kunstler deconstructing the suburban model of development. The family doesn’t talk much, and doesn’t have much contact beyond immediate neighbors. The father drives for several hours to work each day. The mother is going crazy, as her only commitments are to drive their children to various sports and extra-curricular activities. The children don’t seem to know any better. Sound familiar to you.
Highly recommended film. Get out and rent it at your local indie video store. After all, how often can you say you saw a film set in Calgary, about problems that Calgarians face? We call it local cinema, my friends.
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Hey, saw the movie tonight and loved it. It really made me angry (I know that sounds weird since I just said I loved it but you know what I mean) Thanks for blogging it. Wrote up a blog post of my own. If you want you can read it at http://greenlindsey.blogspot.com/2009/06/urban-sprawl.html