The Nevele Grand Resort in Ellenville, NY sits abandoned on 500+ acres near the foot of the Catskill Mountains of New York. What used to be a point of pride for Ulster County is now a painful, crumbling relic - with many stories to tell. For All-American Ruins creator Blake Pfeil, it is also a dreamscape, an artistic playground to reflect on questions about American history, culture, community folklore, economics, the environment, and mental health; and for the viewer, it's an invitation to activate their imagination as a tool for healing.

Logline:
An essay on the struggle to define social utopia through architecture that traces resistance to urban renewal in the 1970s and its aftermath.


Synopsis:
In 1968 architect Ralph Rapson was charged with designing one of the largest urban renewal projects in US history, a utopia constructed entirely of concrete. The plan faced one problem: the neighborhood they wanted to demolish was home to hippies and anarchists who had their own utopian vision. Tracing a remarkable story of resistance to urban renewal and its aftermath, Brutal Utopias uses archival material, participant interviews, and motion graphics to understand the dreams of modernity—and their violence—at the moment they were starting to crumble. It reflects on these dreams by engaging the current residents of Rapson’s brutalist buildings, the East African refugee community, as participants in the filmmaking process. In revisiting this history, Brutal Utopias grapples with questions we face today: how do we design cities and for whom?

Of Time, and the Town poetically depicts twenty years of changes and constants in the built environment of Farmville, Virginia and in the rural areas surrounding it. The film’s super-8 film images bear witness to how everyday locales provide markers of the town’s social evolution. A young couple labors to renovate an abandoned 19th century school and make it their home while the town’s previously shuttered all-Black high school finds new life as a civil rights museum documenting the 1950s student strike that helped integrate the county’s schools. Children grow as one-hundred-year-old oak trees fall. Excerpts from the town’s AM radio station provide a sonic touchstone that complements the film's evocative sound design.

EIGHTEEN MILL STREET introduces Ukrainian artists Marianna Tarish and Nikita Gryshko soon after their relocation to Sweden because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The film explores Tarish and Gryshko’s relationships to intimate and domestic spaces and how they have been impacted due to their experiences at the start of the war while still living in the Ukrainian city of Kherson and as part of their journey to Sweden.