'Rat Film' highlights Baltimore's rat warfare, urban planning failures SEP 13, 2017

It also features a history lesson that begins in the early part of the 20th century, when Baltimore became the first city in the nation to pass a residential segregation law, restricting blacks and whites to certain sections of the city (such laws were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court a few years later). The movie ends with an alternate take on the city's future that almost makes sense, in the most unsettling of ways.

His film developed, Anthony says, as he delved into two areas of research — Baltimore's rats and some unfortunate attempts at urban planning — and realized they dovetailed in ways he never suspected they would. On the heels of the residential segregation legislation, for example, Anthony discovered that parts of the city, often poor and rat-infested, were "redlined" by the insurance industry, forever labeling some areas as both downtrodden and undesirable. And in the 1940s, he also discovered, one byproduct of social and medical research being done on some of these areas was the discovery of a better type of rat poison by a researcher at Johns Hopkins.

"It was like all these really strange coincidences that, when you start to really dive into it, you realize that they're really not coincidences, that they're really linked in their conceptual subject matter," Anthony says. https://archive.is/Gk6sv