Gingerbread Brownstone Mania
Channel: tepalkates
Date: 09/01/2012

In the waning hours of January 8, the Norwegian holiday of gingerbread house destruction, two women enact the ritual with a fervor rarely seen outside of door-buster holiday sales. The action takes place in a post-apocalyptic space in which the only surviving women are all named Katie. It is a space of desperate hunger and wanton violence, but in the midst of this dystopia there is the hope for a more ecstatic life beyond home ownership. The film offers the possibilities of meaning-making through season-based ritualized gingerbread creation and subsequent destruction, and challenges the viewer to ask what does one do with a gingerbread house after Christmas? It is in this space at the intersection of creation and destruction that our heroines explore the U.S. housing crisis, cycles of urban gentrification and displacement, ritualized violence, the feminization of anger, the fetishization of late-Victorian architecture, and the commodification of sugar addiction.