In Levittown, the first of the new post-war ideal cities, an African-American young man walks the streets of identical lined houses and pristine lawns. His monologue evokes the American cinema that made the life in the suburbs of the white middle class – where black people could not buy a house – such a familiar stereotype: from Frank Capra’s “Life Is Beautiful”, to Peter Weir’s “The Truman Show”, Sofia Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides”, or Sam Mendes’s “American Beauty”, in the late 90s. The day begins bright and joyful, full of promise in the future and in the realization of the American dream, but as the light dims, his speech harshens, and the mood becomes heavy. As night falls, the drizzling rain makes for deserted streets, the veneer of perfection cracks and the nightmare replaces the dream, in a nod to David Lynch’s (“Blue Velvet”) simple and efficient grammar of fear. Nelson Bourrec Carter condenses, in this short film, the cinema that defined the suburbs in the collective imagination, while at the same time exposing the fragile reality of the utopia of the American dream, the problems that the stifling artificiality of social normativity and racial segregation not only hide, but create. (IR)