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The story of director Jeremy Workman’s documentary Secret Mall Apartment is summed up in its title. But the film, which credits two-time Oscar nominee Jesse Eisenberg as an executive producer, is about more. Sometimes a bit too much more. Still, the overarching idea is about as tasty as it gets, especially for aging urbanites: In 2003, eight friends living in Rhode Island found an unused, forgotten, 750-square-foot space in a barely accessible upper corner of the Providence Place Mall, furnished it with seating, tables, and a PlayStation, and made it their private hang for four years.

The very thought puts a smile on your face and Workman would have been justified had he just stopped there. But there’s a lot more to unpack in the group's efforts and what they say about artistic expression and the loss of community identity through gentrification. Workman leans into all these notions, allowing...

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2024 SXSW coverage. Secret Mall Apartment is now in theaters.

Shedding light on a quirky 2007 story that made national headlines, Secret Mall Apartment takes us deep into the bowels of the Providence Place Mall, centerpiece of the renaissance of Rhode Island’s capital city developed under convict mayor Buddy Cianci. Apartment residents had the advantage of private access to the theater anytime they wished.

In Secret Mall Apartment, however, the goal is a form of artistic resistance wherein Risd-trained artist Michael Townsend, his wife Adriana, and friends see how long they can stay. The mall and the transformation of Providence was incredibly disruptive, kicking artists out of exciting life, work, and exhibition spaces a few miles away with the goal of clearing the old mill district for strip malls and power centers. It was such a large project it led to...

Magazine Dreams starring Jonathan Majors is eyeing an estimated $700k weekend in 815 theaters, solid in NY, LA and a handful of urban markets but below the $1 million Deadline hears the distributor had initially been hoping for given strong engagement online with the film, which has a 91% verified audience score on Rotten Tomatoes (81% with critics).

The opening weekend miss for what was a very buzzy Sundance title back in 2023 about a troubled but ambitious bodybuilder follows controversy around its star and comes at a tough time for indie films in general. In the months after the film premiered in Park City, Majors was found guilty of two misdemeanor counts of assault and harassment against an ex-girlfriend.

Briarcliff’s documentary October 8 is an upside surprise with a projected $250k weekend at 113 theaters — up 7% from last weekend’s opening at 14 few theaters. AMC Lincoln Square and Century City are top grossers for the...

In some ways, “Secret Mall Apartment” does what it says on the tin. The documentary charts the adventures of an artist collective in Rhode Island that found a hidden space inside the bowels of the Providence Place Mall in 2003. There, the collective created a domestic hideaway in defiance of the consumer mecca that the mall represented, documented the project, and used the space undetected for years.

Director Jeremy Workman and editor Paul Murphy knew there was more nuance to the story than a clandestine performance piece, though. They didn’t want the documentary to feel like a conventional, fill-in-the-blank news item. So they didn’t work in a conventional way, either.

Workman, based in New York, and Murphy, hailing from Australia, divided up the material and worked siloed on specific sequences and with specific types of footage — Murphy with the astonishing Dv shot on an Optio stills camera from the...

Secret Mall Apartment is a new documentary that tells the story of displaced youth who made a mall a home. Eight Rhode Islanders inhabited the new Providence Place mall from 2003 to 2007, using camcorders to film much of their journey. That footage set the stage for an intimate documentary that has already won over critic in advance of its wider release. Secret Mall Apartment was directed by Jeremy Workman and executive produced by Jesse Eisenberg.

ScreenRant is excited to present a poster and promo for Secret Mall Apartment. The poster highlights some of the young artists who decided to make Providence Place Mall their home, while the promo sets the stage for the events of the documentary that The Daily Beast called “A kiss-off to gentrification.” Take a look at the art below, which was designed by Frost Foundry. The promo features cinematography by Jeremy Workman, production design by Grace Bilbao,...

After the relatively barren month of February and the awards season mercifully in the rearview, March finally brings the goods. From some of our favorite festival premieres charting all the way back to a few from Berlinale and Rotterdam last year to new documentaries and thrillers from accomplished directors, check out the batch of eclectic recommendations below.

15. The Empire (Bruno Dumont; March 7)

A year on from its Berlinale debut, where it picked up the Silver Bear Jury Prize, Bruno Dumont’s sci-fi feature The Empire is finally headed stateside. Rory O’Connor said in his review, “Playing his signature brand of rural French absurdity in stark counterpoint to the grandiose strains of a space opera, Bruno Dumont returns with The Empire: his Barbarella bourguignon, his dijionnaise Dune. The Empire is the story of two warring factions: one whose mothership resembles the palace of Versailles; the other’s as if someone glued together two Notre Dames,...

"It seems like a very absurd fantasy, and perhaps a great challenge." Indeed it was. Another unbelievable true story! mTuckman Media has debuted an official trailer for a fun indie documentary film titled Secret Mall Apartment, about a secret mall apartment in Rhode Island. This premiered at SXSW 2024 last year, and it also played at many other film fests in 2024 including Hot Docs, IFFBoston, Melbourne, Vancouver, Woodstock, and Doc NYC, winning 9 awards along the way. In 2003, eight Rhode Islanders created a secret apartment inside a busy mall and lived there for four years, filming everything along the way. Far more than a prank, the secret apartment became a deeply meaningful place for all those involved - many of whom are interviewed in this doc years later. The hilariously unbelievable true story behind the urban legend about a group of friends who created a secret apartment in the busy Providence Place Mall in the early 2000s.

One of our favorite films to premiere at SXSW last year is now rolling out next month. Secret Mall Apartment retells the strange, true tale of a group of friends who created a secret apartment in the busy Providence Place Mall in the early 2000s, bringing back the participants together for the first time in nearly two decades. Directed by Jeremy Workman and executive produced by Jesse Eisenberg, the film will, very fittingly, open on March 21 at the Providence Place Mall, followed by NYC release on March 28 at the IFC Center, and April 2 at the Drafthouse LA. Ahead of the release, the first trailer has arrived.

John Fink said in his review, “Shedding light on a quirky 2007 story that made national headlines, Secret Mall Apartment takes us deep into the bowels of the Providence Place Mall, centerpiece of the renaissance of Rhode Island’s capital city developed under convict mayor Buddy Cianci.

Actor Jesse Eisenberghas begun venturing into filmmaking, and his latest project tells one of the most unique stories to ever come out of an American mall. Eisenberg is an executive producer on Secret Mall Apartment, an upcoming documentary that just released its official trailer. The film follows the true story of eight Rhode Islanders who secretly build an apartment inside one of the state's busiest malls as a prank— and end up living there for four years.

“A Real Pain,” writer/director/actor Jesse Eisenberg isn’t just campaigning for an Oscar: Eisenberg is also readying the theatrical release of his documentary, “Secret Mall Apartment.”

Eisenberg executive produces the festival favorite feature, which is directed by Jeremy Workman (“Lily Topples The World”). This is Eisenberg’s second collaboration with Workman after executive producing Workman’s 2018 documentary “The World Before Your Feet.”

“Secret Mall Apartment” tells the story of eight Rhode Island artists who created a secret apartment inside the busy Providence Place Mall in 2003. The group lived there for four years and filmed (almost) everything along the way.

As the official synopsis teases, the secret apartment became a “personal expression of defiance against local gentrification, a boundary-pushing work of public/private art, a clubhouse in which large-scale charitable art projects were planned, and, finally, a 750 square-foot ‘F you’ to The Man.”

In other words, it was about more than just squatting.

Cinema Eye Honors today shared a string of announcements, including the 16 films on its Audience Choice Prize Longlist, the unveiling of this year’s Unforgettables Honorees, nominees in its five Broadcast categories, and its annual Shorts List — spotlighting 11 of the year’s top documentary short films — at its 7th annual Cinema Eye Fall Lunch in Downtown Los Angeles on October 24, 2024.

Spotlighted on the film side are several major Best Documentary Feature contenders including “Will & Harper,” “Black Box Diaries,” and “No Other Land,” which all also factored into the organization’s list of Unforgettables — standout on-camera collaborators from eight feature documentaries. This next ceremony will be the first time those honorees, like Harper Steele, Shiori Ito, and Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham for those respective films, receive a special medallion honoring their contribution to their Cinema Eye-winning films.

Highlights among the Broadcast nominees include filmmaker Lance Oppenheim, nominated for both...

NewportFILM Outdoors, a unique screening series that is held on the lawns and grounds of the mansions and parks that make Newport, R.I., a tourist destination, has unveiled its summer season slate of programming.

The series, which highlights notable documentaries, will kick off next week with Jeff Zimbalist’s “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” one of the breakouts of this year’s Sundance. Netflix swooped in and bought the film in one of the festival’s biggest deals — it tells the story of two daredevils’ attempt to climb a super skyscraper. Other films that will screen throughout the summer include movies about cultural or sports figures such as Elizabeth Taylor (“Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” from HBO), Joan Baez (“Joan Baez: I Am Noise” from Magnolia Pictures), horse trainer Monty Roberts (“The Cowboy and the Queen” from Greenwich Entertainment) and big wave surfer Maya Gabeira (“Maya and the Wave”). In addition,...

Canada’s Hot Docs documentary festival has wrapped its 31st edition in Toronto (May 5) and named Yintah the winner of its Rogers Audience Award for Best Canadian Documentary.

The award, whose winner is determined by an audience poll, comes with a cash prize of Cad 50,000.

Directed by Jennifer Wickham, Brenda Michell and Michael Toledano, Yintah is about the efforts of the Canadian First Nation Wet’suwet’en people to resist the construction of pipelines across their territory.

On Friday evening (May 3) Hot Docs announced the prize winners from its official competition line-up (full list below).

The festival’s Best Canadian Feature Documentary Award,...

1991’s severely underrated “Career Opportunities” revolved primarily around one night in the life of Frank Whaley’s department store custodian as he works a shift at employer Target while simultaneously romancing Jennifer Connelly, while “Dawson’s Creek” used a similar conceit in a season six episode, seeing Joey and Pacey locked overnight within the recesses of another retail giant; even Nickelodeon Magazine joined the fray with their 1990 premiere issue, hiding within its pages a short story about children stranded at a similar store and the misadventures that result.

Continue reading ‘Secret Mall Apartment’ Review: Art And Rebellion Collide In This Unique Time Capsule [SXSW] at The Playlist.

Some solutions to the housing crisis are more creative than others. For a group of artists in Providence, Rhode Island, that idea was put to the test when they infiltrated and inhabited a hidden alcove in their local mall for four years — a symbol of gentrification they repurposed into a decidedly anticapitalist communal space. The aptly named “Secret Mall Apartment,” directed by Jeremy Workman and executive produced by Jesse Eisenberg, is a thoughtful celebration of the DIY artistry behind that experiment, but only a so-so investigation of it.

Like a lot of great plans, this one was barely planned at all. After he and three of his friends decided to see who could pull off living inside Providence Place Mall the longest, Michael Townsend, drawing on a random memory of the building’s construction four years earlier, recalled a “nowhere space” where he and his cohort might find shelter: a...

Jeremy Workman’s new film, Secret Mall Apartment, follows a man named Micheal Townsend and seven other people who rebelled against societal norms to create their very own secret apartment inside the Providence Place mall in Rhode Island. Collider’s Steve Weintraub got the opportunity to talk more about the documentary in greater detail with producer Jesse Eisenberg (Zombieland) and Workman at SXSW 2024. They expressed during their interview how the story's depictions of art, gentrification, homeownership, and privilege served as the inspiration for the film. “But when you watch the movie, it's what Jeremy does so well is like, you realize that this is a movie about like a cultural shift happening at that moment in the country really, which was just this gentrification in these kinds of, you know, post-war forgotten cities.” Eisberg says. “You know, there was this area that was kind of like lower income area, more...

When the Providence Place Mall was constructed in the late ’90s, it was touted by Rhode Island leaders as a sign of urban renewal for its struggling capital city. For eight artists, it became something else — home.

These friends constructed a makeshift apartment — complete with a sofa, a TV and video game system, a microwave and a cinderblock wall — in a hidden alcove of the shopping complex’s garage. To run the appliances, they tapped into the mall’s electricity. Amazingly, this hangout spot (where some of the friends even spent several shivery nights), went undiscovered for four years. Their audacious gambit was launched in response to the gentrification taking place around them, a humorous protest against the capitalist forces that threatened to push the city’s artistic community to its outer edges. It’s also the subject of “Secret Mall Apartment,” a fascinating new documentary from Jeremy Workman (“Lily...