Category: Film

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Some Kind of Heaven (Lance Oppenheim, 2020)

Lance Oppenheim’s debut docoumentary, Some Kind of Heaven, is a deep, thoughtful, complex portrait of life in The Villages, Florida’s planned New Urbanist retirement community.

Like a day in a Disney dream-land, the “heaven-on-earth” glow of life in The Villages ultimately fades — quicker for some than others — and rather than rich fulfilling nourishment we are left with nothing but the sickly false-taste of artificial sweeteners. Alas, it would seem, humans are not so easily fooled by murals and mirages, by facades and fabrications, try as we might to self-deceive. Somewhere deep down, our inner souls crave the sustenance of real community and honest spiritual meaning; we are not easily satisfied with a fiction or a lie.

Read my full review of the film on Arts Fuse.

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Traffic Separating Device (Johan Palmgren, 2018)

This short and quirky documentary (14 min.) captures what happens on a busy Stockholm street when the City Council votes to install a “spår-vidds-hinder” (a new-fangled device embedded in the middle of the road to allow buses, but not cars, to use a specific lane — or, as described more accurately by one of the locals, a “car trap”).

Along the way, there are more than a few flat tires and broken axles — and one missed ferry-ride leading (sadly) to an aborted birthday party. It’s humorous and light, but planners will recognize and identify with real world challenges presented as a well-intentioned traffic solution goes horribly off-road. In the end, the experiment delivers an important lesson: even the simplest urban planning interventions need to account for “the human factor.” (Or, in the words of one of bemused on-lookers, “It’s bloody hilarious. There are idiots, and then there are idiots.”) Notes to self: nobody ever reads signs, everyone assumes that the rules don’t apply to them, and people trust their GPS more than their own eyes.

Streaming online via PBS.

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