‘Secret Mall Apartment,’ Doc on Artists Living In Mall, Is On Netflix

Secret Mall ApartmentThe 2024 documentary, which follows several artists as they lived in secret for four years at a Providence mall, is released on Netflix on Friday.

Originally released in theaters last March, the film became one of the top documentaries of the year and has since become available for rent on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV. However, as is always the case when a movie or TV show is released on Netflix, this documentary is sure to reach a whole new level of audience.

Secret Mall ApartmentDirected by Jeremy Workman, it tells the story of Michael Townsend, an adjunct professor and painting instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2003, Townsend and seven others, many of them former students in his summer program at the Rhode Island School of Design, secretly built an apartment within the Providence Square Mall as a protest against gentrification, consumer culture, and the mall’s encroachment on Eagle Plaza, a deindustrial neighborhood popular with artists in the early 2000s.

Over the course of four years, the group lived in the mall for up to three weeks at a time, often documenting their lives with small digital cameras. In 2007, the apartment was discovered and Townsend was eventually charged with trespassing. In October of the same year, he was sentenced to probation and banned from shopping malls for life.

The documentary, like the art project it spawned, is a strange and entertaining exploration of the often blurred lines between art and life. As Alissa Wilkinson wrote in her review new york timesthe film “convincingly demonstrates that the project continues to reverberate in the artist’s life to this day, and perhaps even throughout the city.”

Check out the trailer below, and watch the movie here: