I recently found out that the award-winning feature-length film, Radiant City, originally released in 2006 had recently been made available for free by the National Film Board of Canada.

In the docu-drama, Gary Burns (Waydowntown), Canada’s king of surreal comedy, joins Calgary journalist Jim Brown on an outing to the suburbs. Venturing into territory both familiar and foreign, they turn the documentary genre inside out, crafting a vivid account of life in The Late Suburban Age.

During the film, Burns and Brown look at the brutalizing aesthetic of strip malls and listen to fears about the soul-eating suburbs. Making heavy use of cultural references, they riff off sitcoms and reality TV and drop names from Jane Jacobs to The Sopranos while all the while using a range of cinematic devices to look at what happens when cities get sick and mutate.

2006, 85 min 34 s