Secret Mall Apartment (2025 | USA | 91 minutes | Jeremy Workman)
Stay in a shopping mall for a whole week without getting kicked out by security? Sounds like an initiation rite for a fraternity pledge, but in 2003 it became an all-consuming immersive project for eight artists in Providence, Rhode Island, that stretched on beyond the initial prank for four years. When they were eventually discovered, their story became a local media sensation and the stuff of urban legend. A decade later, the tale was told in part by the 99% Invisible podcast. Now, with the participation of all eight inhabitants (seven of whom had remained anonymous until now) and some executive production assistance from Jesse Eisenberg, director Jeremy Workman brings their story to the big screen.
Partially inspired in response to a silly commercial for a monstrous new mall that had divided their city, four friends wondered what would happen if someone actually tried to live in a shopping center that offered luxury goods to the wealthy and very little to the people being displaced by gentrification. The initial stint of sleeping through the night undiscovered by security soon bloomed when one of the pranksters remembered seeing a “nowhere” space in the hulking structure that didn’t correspond to anything in the finished floor plans. Some dextrous spelunking through narrow passageways revealed a 750-square-foot landing buried deep within the walls of the vast infrastructure. Subverting the prevailing mood of redevelopment, they recruited a few more artists, swore each other to secrecy, and proceeded to make that windowless cavern an unlikely rent-free condominium.
To all our benefit, their adventures took place in the early days of the new millennium, when pocket-sized digital cameras allowed a new wave of self-documentation. Here, Workman compiles their footage, from initial discovery to the great lengths that they went to avoid being detected while transforming the dusty place their own, complete with cozy furnishings from the Salvation Army, a wall built from hundreds of concrete blocks, and a locking door. Over months of stealthy expeditions, they demonstrate the extent to which a PlayStation and sectional sofa can really make a house a home.
While the whole thing sounds like a youthful prank, the documentary wisely situates the adventure in a broader context of gentrification and artistic intentions. Rather than simply replay videos of their time in the space or the hijinks they got up to, it first zooms out to look at Providence in the late-1990s and early-2000s. At that time, the carcass of the industrial revolution — abandoned mills and factories — that became living and performance spaces for emerging artists were suddenly becoming displaced in the name of progress. With fewer and fewer places to call their own, setting up a secret clubhouse in a palace of commerce became a small but meaningful strike back.
Further, the film explores how the mall apartment was part of a continuum of the artistic practice of its ringleader Michael Townsend (who, up until the release of the documentary, was the only person ever identified in its creation). Having grown up in the area, taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, and being active in the regional arts scene, he bore witness to the drastic changes sweeping through the city, to the exclusion of its less privileged residents. While the mall project may have been the most experimental and headline-grabbing, it was of a piece with his 2000s ethos of performance living, challenging the porous boundaries between life and making art.
Watching the apartment come together is in itself mind-boggling, but it stands alongside several other of their contemporary projects that embraced the ephemeral. Deeply moving footage away from the mall shows Townsend’s practice of “tape art” enriching the lives of patients in children’s hospitals and paying tribute to the victims of terrorist attacks in both Oklahoma and New York City. With self-made footage of their exploits, present-day interviews with all of the participants, and even a recreation that brings the whole story full circle, the documentary is an eye-opening time capsule with current-day relevance.
Most of all, it’s incredibly fun to see how their cleverness (and acknowledged privilege) allowed a bunch of twentysomethings to pull off such an outlandish scheme. While it’s hard to believe that they succeeded and maintained the gambit for so many years, the excellent documentary makes it very easy to appreciate why it remains, decades later, a foundational and deeply meaningful piece of each participant’s personal history.
Secret Mall Apartment plays Northwest Film Forum from April 4-13th