Victoria

California City is an unfinished municipality, a would-be metropolis—an idea that didn’t come to fruition. A network of streets was laid out in the desert, but it didn’t pull in the expected crowds. Today, decades later, a handful of people live in what is a vast area, including a young Black man, Lashay T. Warren, a newcomer from Los Angeles. This documentary is a record of his everyday life in this strange, spectral place full of empty space and geysers made of bursting pipes. With a turbulent past behind him, Warren is like a soul who has to work, study, and endure boredom in sunny purgatory until further notice. He prefers to see himself, however, as an heir to the American pioneers. Like them, he tries to make his own mark on the semi-wild territory: he names mountains and streets after himself and comes up with a special new name for the whole of Cal City.