Media Release - A Vancity Theatre Presentation

Combining nostalgia, dazzling architecture, pop culture, economics and politics, Malls R Us examines North America's most popular and profitable suburban destination—the enclosed shopping center—and how for consumers they function as a communal, even ceremonial experience and, for retailers, sites where their idealism, passion and greed merge.

With a sepulchral soundtrack by Air (Lost in Translation), the film blends archival footage, visits to some of the world's largest and most spectacular malls, and interviews with architects, mall developers, sales managers, environmentalists, labor activists and social critics, as well as mall shoppers themselves.

MALLS R US discusses the psychological appeal of malls to consumers, how architects design their environments to combine consumerism with nature and spectacle, how suburban shopping centers impart social values, how malls are transforming the traditional notions of community, social space and human interaction, and shows nostalgic mall fans who commemorate the closing of older malls on their DeadMalls.com Web site.

Visiting the construction sites of several of the world's largest shopping centers of the future, in Dubai and India, MALLS R US reveals how their gargantuan growth, both in size and geographical expansion, as virtual cities devoted to tourism, leisure and luxury shopping, threaten small shop owners and the environment.

As entertaining as it is informative, MALLS R US offers a trip to the mall like no other, reveling in their architectural splendor as consumerist paradises but also showing how the social dynamism they represent can be a destructive force, one that confuses the good life with the world of goods.

HELENE KLODAWSKY- WRITER DIRECTOR
A graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art, Helene Klodawsky has been writing and directing social, political and arts documentaries for 20 years. Her films have been screened and televised around the world, and have received more than 25 awards, including honours from the Chicago International Film Festival, the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Jerusalem International Film Festival, the Mannheim International Film Festival, Hot Docs and the Academy of Canadian Cinema. Painted Landscapes of the Times (1986), Shoot and Cry (1989), Motherland (1994), What If (1999) Undying Love (2002) and No More Tears Sister (2004) are some of her documentary credits.

Helene Klodawsky is a member of the Canadian Independent Film Caucus, the Director's Guild of Canada and the Writer's Guild of Canada.

“Wonderful... brought something marvelous and unexpected and new to the subject. As you watch it, its scope broadens and broadens, like a complex film plot. At the end you feel as if you've seen something slightly holy.”
– Douglas Coupland, author

“Fascinating yet ultimately frightening... an elegant, thoughtful documentary which exposes the mindset of mallpreneurs and mall designers, from the time malls were first invented till the present, and the increasingly sophisticated, calculated effects of their manipulations.”
– Mark Achbar, filmmaker, The Corporation

“A powerful reminder as we slide into global economic crisis of how much mass consumption has shaped people's lives and created the public spaces of modern societies…This film impresses upon us the folly of our ways, the alternatives we might entertain, but also the difficulties we will face extricating ourselves from a world overly dependent on retail for prosperity and community.” – Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America