Documentary looks at public potty
Film about washroom shown in Air Canada enroute film festival
If you’re relieving yourself in the glass-walled washroom on the northeast corner of Whyte Avenue and Gateway Boulevard, any notion of privacy is down the toilet.
That interplay of privacy and public space fascinated local filmmaker Adam Bentley months after the outdoor washroom opened June 2012 in his Strathcona neighbourhood.
Early in 2013, he produced and directed a six-minute documentary called iCUP that examines people’s perception of the contentious building.
Now folks outside the city can form their own opinion on our potties thanks to Air Canada’s enRoute film festival, whose judges recently chose iCUP as one of its top 16 films. Flyers can vote for their favourite film, with their top five picks scoring a trip to the Sundance Film Festival and the winner nabbing $5,000.
“People either love it or they hate it,” Bentley says of the washroom. “If they love it, it’s because it’s an interesting building in your typical early 20th-century landscape, or they think it’s great for safety. Or they hate it because it costs, in their opinion, a lot of money. Or they think it’s very patronizing, thinking you can’t be trusted to use the bathroom and that it’s too open.”
Bentley is showcasing our city to many people for the first time as they lounge 35,000 feet in the air. But even though the film centres on a washroom, it still manages to highlight the city’s innovation, he says.
“I don’t think that Edmontonians should by any means be ashamed of this film showing the bathroom to the world. They should be proud, in fact,” he says. “You see a lot of these architecture micro-documentaries are all over the Internet. But they’re always in New York or London or Paris or Tokyo.”
London, boasts a similarly jarring washroom. The cubed structure features one-way mirrors that allow participants to spy on unsuspecting passersby as they take care of their business. But the effect of that public installation is more for the sake of art than for practicality, Bentley says.
Those concepts are inverted with Whyte Avenue’s washroom, which was designed to be as unwelcoming as possible, its architect reveals in the film. Heating, for instance, is limited in the winter to discourage people from sleeping inside, while cooling is turned off in the summer.
Some of washroom’s design elements have actually produced an opposite effect. The men’s washroom faces the street while the women’s side faces the parking lot for greater privacy. But the reduced visibility has led to a spike in vandalism in the women’s washroom, Bentley learned.
It’s those kind of details that get people talking, he says. And for a city that tears down buildings more often than it builds them, flushing out apathy toward urban design is proving more important than ever. “I think it’s becoming an iconic building because it’s controversial,” Bentley says. “Certainly in an age when everybody has to compete for attention however they can, if you can get somebody to have an opinion about something, love or hate it, go for it.”