LAND OF THE SUN

LAND OF THE SUN was filmed in California City in November 2014. California City is the third-largest city in the state of California and is located in the Mojave Desert. The City had its origins in 1965 when real estate developer and sociology professor Nat Mendelsohn purchased 80,000 acres (320 km2) of Mojave Desert land with the aim of master-planning California’s next great city. He designed his model city, which he hoped would one day rival Los Angeles in size, around a Central Park with an artificial lake and a golf course.

Growth did not happen anywhere close to what he expected. To this day a vast grid of crumbling paved roads, scarring vast stretches of the Mojave Desert, intended to lay out residential blocks, extends well beyond the developed area of the city. As of 2008, fifty years after Mendelsohn, California city had a total population of around 14000, living in a small town to the southwest of the vast empty grids. Without showing any protagonists, the video is filmed with contemporary techniques (DSLR, POV (“dashcam”) and aerial Drone photography) and focuses on the visible architectural leftovers of one of the world’s biggest failed urban planning projects.

Niklas Goldbach