Storyville: In Excess by Melissa Langer

In Excess by Melissa Langer

(USA, 2025, 71 min)

In Excess examines labor, capital, and displacement in modern America through the lens of one city’s trash — in sewers and streets, waterways and workplaces. It’s a gritty dive into the inner workings of a city’s infrastructure that embraces different formats, weaving newly digitized archival material together with surveillance footage and contemporary vignettes of people at work, communities in flux, and waste in motion. Observational and off-beat, the film finds harmonies and dissonance in patterns of creation, consumption, and renewal.

Melissa Langer is an artist, director, and Emmy-nominated Cinematographer based in Philadelphia. In her work as a Director, she draws from methods of experimental cinema, offering non-linear, layered portraits of systems, labor, and urban infrastructure.