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Waydowntown

Director: Gary Burns, Canada, 2000, 83 mins, 35mm, M adult themes

Tom, Sandra, Randy and Curt have all staked a month's salary on a bet to see who can stay indoors the longest. It helps that they live and work in a city's downtown where virtually all of the buildings are connected by a maze of glassed-in bridges. Why, with all of the office towers, shopping malls and apartment buildings joined, they could stay inside until they retire! If it wasn't driving them all slightly crazy.

In November 1998, Gary Burns put together an idea based on a long time gripe of his: the "plus 15" walkway system of his hometown's city centre. Built 15 feet above the streets (hence the name), the walkways interconnect many of the downtown's buildings. "The unfortunate result of this ever-expanding system is that these walkways have sucked the life out of the downtown core," says Burns. "I imagined a film where the main characters inhabit this architectural anomaly: a metaphor of sorts for modernism gone wrong.

Shot on digital video and transferred to 35mm, Waydowntown captures a sense of heightened realism in a suffocating world of offices, parking garages and constantly humming air ventilators. Burns creates a world that has us questioning the way we spend our days and makes us reconsider our aspirations and goals with energy, humour and imagination. Stacey Donen, Toronto Film Festival 2000