The 15-minute short film version of Planet City depicts scenes from a planetary festival held in the imaginary city, a 365-day procession that moves through different neighborhoods changing form as it intersects with significant cultural celebrations. To capture the festival a set of festival costumes were developed for the film in collaboration with Hollywood costume director Ane Crabtree The Handmaid’s Tale, Westworld) and a group of designers and textile artists from around the world.

Planet City

Humans dominate the planet. As a consequence of hundreds of years Following centuries of colonization, globalization and never-ending economic extraction and expansionism we have remade the world from the scale of the cell to the tectonic plate.

But what if we radically reversed this planetary sprawl? What if we reached a global consensus to retreat from our vast network of cities and entangled supply chains into one hyper-dense metropolis housing the entire population of the earth? Planet City explores the productive potential of extreme densification, where 10 billion people surrender the rest of the planet to a global wilderness.

Although wildly provocative, Planet City eschews the techno-utopian fantasy of designing a new world order. This is not a neo-colonial masterplan to be imposed from a singular seat of power. It is a work of critical architecture – a speculative fiction grounded in statistical analysis, research and traditional knowledge. It is a collaborative work of multiple voices and cultures supported by an international team of acclaimed environmental scientists, theorists and advisors. In Planet City we see that climate change is no longer a technological problem, but rather an ideological one, rooted in culture and politics.

This is a fiction shaped like a city. Simultaneously an extraordinary image of tomorrow and an urgent examination of the environmental questions facing us today.

Director Liam Young
Production Design Liam Young
Costume Director/Producer Ane Crabtree
Main Costume Assistant Courtney Mitchell
Costume Assistant Ela Erdogan
Costume Artists Holly McQuillian, Karin Peterson, Kathryn Walters (Zero Waste Weavers), Aneesa Shami (High Altitude Bot Herder), Yeohlee Teng (Code Talker), Courtney Mitchell (Beekeeper), Ane Crabtree (Nomadic Worker, Algae Diver, Drone Shepard)
Fiber Artist Janice Arnold
Mask Artists Liam Young (High Altitude Bot Herder, Code Talker, Algae Diver, Drone Shepard), Zac Monday (Zero Waste Weavers)
Costume Still Photography Driely S
Costume stills Photoshoot Produced by Eva Huang
Performed by David Freeland Jr, AJ and Miguel Alejandro Lopez, Joy Brown of Jacob Jonas The Company
Commissioned by NGV Melbourne & Ewan McEoin