Sunday 3 July 2011

Going Back To ‘Dark Days’ a Decade Later

DARKDAYSDark Days director Marc Singer recently returned to the former site of NYC’s subterranean shanty-town commune to find it completely flushed out of the city’s guts. For its 10th anniversary, the documentary returns to Cinema Village today.

Since the first time Singer ventured into the abandoned graffiti-adorned “Freedom Tunnel” where a community of homeless hid from the cops, scoured for food, showered under cracked pipes and tapped into the electrical grid for power, it’s changed. Marc Singer tells WNYC:

It was completely clean. The graffiti that was there has been painted over and covered over. There was no sign of life whatsoever. There was no rats — no anything really. I’ve never seen it so sterile.

Consider his decade old film project an act of urban eplorer philanthropy and one of the best artistic efforts in non-exploitative documentary making — Singer helped his documentary subjects find above-ground housing. A clip:


View the original article here

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