As Sergio posted about a week ago… First Run Features acquired Chad Freidrich's excellent and compelling documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: An Urban History for threatical distribution, VOD and DVD, after a sucessful film festival run.
Today, the company announced that it will open the film at New York's IFC Center on January 20, 2012, and will likely expand in successive weeks, depending on how it fares in NYC.
The feature-length documentary tells the story of the transformation of the American city in the decades after World War II, through the lens of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing development and the St. Louis residents who called it home.
Built in 1956, Pruitt-Igoe was heralded as the model public housing project of the future, "the poor man's penthouse." Two decades later, it ended in rubble – its razing an iconic event that the architectural theorist Charles Jencks famously called "the death of modernism."
Further…
The footage and images of its implosion have helped to perpetuate a myth of failure, a failure that has been used to critique Modernist architecture, attack public assistance programs, and stigmatize public housing residents. THE PRUITT-IGOE MYTH seeks to set the historical record straight. To examine the interests involved in Pruitt-Igoe's creation. To re-evaluate the rumors and the stigma. To implode the myth.
Here's the trailer: