Radiant City

Originally published in Swerve Magazine


By Drew Anderson



Radiating out of the city’s core, past the strip malls, porn shops and gas stations of Macleod Trail, through countless lights, beside countless cars, under the overpasses that truly demarcate the line of what has been and what will be. This is where you find yourself in Gary Burns’ new documentary, Radiant City.
The celebrated Calgary filmmaker partnered with friend and CBC radio Eyeopener host Jim Brown to tackle the subject of modern North American suburbs. “We didn’t want to make a didactic doc—here’s the good guys, here’s the bad guys, here’s the victims and here’s the solution,” says Burns. “That melancholy—‘this is the best we can do’—I think that’s what we were trying to achieve.” It’s what propelled the duo, as they followed the Moss family and some of their friends and neighbours through the suburban experience, resigned to their fate or trying to embrace it.
The film sets beautifully coloured cinematography against the sparse environment in which the families live. The Moss children take the filmmakers on a quirky and funny tour through their surreal community; the father, Evan, resigns himself to his new reality and Ann, the mother, just stresses out.
“To me, it’s one of the biggest tragedies in North America—the way we’re building our cities and people are just kind of going along with it. People should be fighting for a decent place to live,” says Burns by way of telephone, sitting on his porch in Sunnyside.
Navigating through Calgary’s suburbs is like vertigo to the uninitiated; gone are the grids of the core, the only straight line is the hyperbolic trail that brings you out this far. But there is variety here: artists who can no longer afford the luxury of downtown; families that can’t fight the urge to own a yard, a mud room, an attached garage.
Here, on the edge, there is hope of an end, confinement of Calgary’s ecological footprint, the largest in Canada. The sky reaches out to still extant countryside, rolled hay bails in fields. Trees even.
But next to the billboard proclaiming a new, idealized marketing vision—Happy Hills, Paradise Gardens, Once-Had-Trees Ville or Babbling Brook Estates—is a mound of dirt and idle equipment designed to plow and dig and smooth.
Though the critics peppered throughout the movie either pan the whole suburban project, speak of its promise, or of its inevitability, the filmmakers just wanted to make people stop and think; to show the suburbs as they see it.
“This is it, this is the best you can do for people living?” says Brown. “You want to get an actual cup of coffee you have to get in your car and get on the freeway and drive for ten minutes. Is that living?”