a 19 minute short documentary produced in the 2025 Union Docs Collaborative Studio.

CoDirectors: Mia Warren & Jesse Allain-Marcus

Producer, Sound Recordist & Gamer: Mia Warren

Director of Photography: Jesse Allain-Marcus

Editors: Jesse Allain-Marcus & Marshall Hanig

CoProducer, Additional Camera & Sound: Marshall Hanig

LOGLINE: Through visuals of fish tanks, captured screen grabs of a childhood computer game, and the halted construction of a luxury housing complex, The Optimum Aquarium explores the ideas of care and compassion in built environments — and the violence of commercial development in New York City neighborhoods.

SYNOPSIS: The Optimum Aquarium is a film that interrogates who controls where people live in 21st-century Bushwick and Ridgewood: two neighborhoods on the border of Brooklyn and Queens that are experiencing the churn and change of gentrification.

The Optimum Aquarium invites its viewers into the inner worlds of fish tanks, their inhabitants, and their owners, and puts fish tank care in dialogue with cultural and historical ideas around containment, ownership, and human/animal life cycles. The film takes us into the mindset of commercial developers seeking to transform the neighborhood, and it focuses on Myrtle Point/Ridgewood Towers — a new development where an immigrant construction worker fell to his death in 2022. This site reflects the cold calculations of capital and our limited ability to control the built environments around us.

Interspersed with shots of the neighborhood and fish tanks are screen grabs from The Sims 4: City Living, a game where an ideology of ownership and unattainable utopia emerges. By juxtaposing gameplay with real-life images and sounds of a neighborhood in flux, The Optimum Aquarium examines how mythologies about landlordism persist around us — and asks how we might create alternate futures.