Brutal Utopias (2023)
Now Streaming as part of Minnesota Experience on TPT/PBS
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 a counterculture with its 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?
Selected Screenings and Broadcast:
Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival—Audience Choice Award, Best Documentary Short
Middlebury New Filmmaker’s Festival—Finalist, Best Documentary Short
Mimesis Documentary Film Festival, Boulder, Colorado—Official Selection
Chagrin Documentary Film Festival, Chagrin Ohio—Official Selection
Architectural Film Festival Rotterdam—Official Selection
Czech Film and Architecture Festival, Prague, CZ—Official Selection
Duluth/Superior Film Festival—Official Selection
Regis Art Center, Minneapolis 2023
Cedar Cultural Center, Minneapolis, 2024
National Building Museum, Washington, D.C., 2024
Northrup Auditorium, University of Minnesota, 2024
Twin Cities Public Television (tpt, tpt2): 2025, 2026
Minnesota History Center: 2025
An essay on the struggle to define social utopia through architecture that traces resistance to urban renewal in the 1970s and its aftermath.
(documentary, 35’)
Nothing in Particular (Unboxing Video) (2026)
(experimental documentary short, 8’)
A woman in Minneapolis reflects on becoming a new mom in the upheavals of 2020 through a seemingly banal object: cardboard. Combining stop motion animation with live action, this experimental essay unpacks the messiness of everyday life through the desires both revealed and hidden when we open the box.
Screenings:
Antimatter [Media Art], Victoria, British Columbia—Official Selection
Mimesis Documentary Festival, Boulder, Colorado— Finalist, Best Documentary Short
Capital City Film Festival, Lansing, Michigan—Official Selection
Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival—Official Selection
A poetic investigation of the relationship between chemistry and culture as communities in Minnesota come to terms with their toxic legacy as the birthplace of forever chemicals.
I Am the Strange
(documentary feature in production)
