Review: "The World Before Your Feet" (2018)

It's simple yet mind-boggling in its ambition: a guy decides to walk on every block in NYC.

This great undertaking was the project of a guy named Matt Green who spent 6 years doing just that. And it was captured in a documentary called The World Before Your Feet, released in 2018, and recently watched by yours truly on Amazon Prime.

The cameras and viewers tag along with Green, an amiable former engineer, on his grand trek. It cuts across the months and years, the seasons and weather, the neighborhoods and streets, as Matt simply walks and observes the five boroughs, a whole diverse world before his feet.

As Green criss-crosses the entire city, he makes us look at it in ways we might not have done before. For example, he notes that there are roughly 300 9/11 homemade memorials all over town. He points out "churchagues", old synogogues that were converted into primarily Catholic churches as the Jewish populations moved out and the Latino populations moved in (you see the crosses atop of the buildings but can also see Stars of David engraved in the marble). He notes blocks where history was made, like Margaret Sanger's first birth control dispensary or the sites of various old forgotten crimes. He points out buildings that were abadoned halfway through their construction when the 2008 financial crises hit and the money vanished. Green's also ventures beyond the streets, into the parks and massive greenspaces of NYC, reminding us that a city isn't just concrete and buildings and masses of people but a complex topography where nature is a close sibling.

In short, Green's journey and this documentary is a street-level panoroma of NYC, an urban kaleidoscope captured on film. His project and this film makes the city a living animal, a pulsating creature. I don't think I've ever seen NYC presented on filme this way before -- it's not fetished, it's not put on a pedestal, there aren't great shots of the cityscapes, no loving postcard-like images. Quite the opposite. This movie explores NYC literally from the ground up, from the streets, from the outerparts of the outerboroughs to the center of the it all. It's NYC from the inside out, an intimate and almost sensual experience.  

Green didn't do this projects for money or fame or glory. He did it just to do it. Just to have a great and unique experience. He wrote about it constantly on his blog I'm Just Walkin', noting that he clocked nearly 9,300 miles on the streets of NYC. 

I strongly suggest you watch this film, and read this blog, and rediscover NYC all over again.