The Mission's an interesting place to screen a movie about gentrification, filmed from the eyes of the gentrifier -- so there was certainly no shortage of things to think about at last night's showing of for DocFest at the Roxie.

New Urban Cowboy is a documentary about Michael Arth, a kind of hippie-dippie former resident of Santa Barbara who moves to the small town of Deland, Florida, near Orlando, and more or less single-handedly beautifies a decrepit drug-laden area formerly known as "Cracktown" into "the Historic DeLand Garden District," in accordance with his philosophies on urban planning and home design.

Arth, though sweet, is kind of a weird dude, he seems extremely difficult to live with, and we must admit the house designs weren't really quite our cup of tea (they seemed kind of twee). But there's no denying that Arth did a great thing for the town of DeLand -- after he moved in and painstakingly bought and renovated what ultimately totaled around 20 plots of land in Cracktown, the crime rate in town dropped by 10 percent, property values skyrocketed, and civic pride bloomed.

But, as Arth himself admits, the drug dealers just moved to other parts of town and the homelessness problem near the neighborhood continued. We found ourselves wondering, despite ourselves, about what the rest of DeLand looked like, and not just the ye olde quainte historic village of the Garden District, and what their social services system looked like. Hey, you show a movie in San Francisco District 6, this is what we're going to think about!

New Urban Cowboy screens again this Saturday (10/6) at 5 p.m.

New Urban Cowboy