Utopia, Part 3: The World's Largest Shopping Mall

When this 13 minute film ended, I wanted more, so much more. There were too many films I'd seen at the Full Frame Film Festival that seemed to drag on forever, and Utopia, Part 3 was like taking a bite out of a ribeye steak. It's delicious, but now your stomach is waiting for the rest of the beef. With quiet shots of empty escalators, yawning employees, and wandering mascots, we are taken on a journey through a failed experiment: To build the world's largest mall in southern China. Having few customers and a handful of stores, the mall sits in it's record-sized lot collecting dust. The film is brilliantly shot, and the humor is drawn through the opposition between gluttony and loneliness. There are a few lines of dialogue, which I hesitated to ask the director about during the Q & A (I didn't want to get thrown out that early!). In my opinion, the film functions much more effectively in silence, letting us draw our own conclusions about this empty space.