Pipe Dreams
2023 · 6m
Directed by Christina Woo
Genres: documentary
A documentary about the bugs that live in Chouinard Dormitory and their struggles in a building that's falling apart.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone wants to make you care about the bugs; Woo's joke is that the building itself is the real protagonist, and the insects are just honest witnesses to institutional neglect—which is genuinely perverse in the best way.
The film situates itself in a lineage of observational documentary that treats vernacular spaces with anthropological seriousness, though one wonders if the whimsy occasionally softens what could be a sharper formal argument about decay and indifference.
The stroke of genius is treating the dormitory as a character through sound design and framing—Woo never condescends to the bugs or the building, and that refusal to pick a side creates something that feels alive in six minutes.