Jennifer and Nick Moss in Radiant City, showing at the Newport International Film Festival.

Burns Film Ltd. Burns Film Ltd.

The Newport International Film Festival opens its 10th year at 7 tonight with a screening of In the Shadow of the Moon, a documentary about the Apollo lunar landing missions, at the Jane Pickens Theater.

It will continue through Sunday with dozens of features, documentaries and shorts. One of tomorrow’s highlights will be the Canadian film Radiant City.

The nightmare of life in suburbia — the long commutes, the lack of nightlife, the paucity of foot traffic, the box stores with their enormous parking lots, the neighbors you never see — is chronicled by Canadian filmmakers Gary Burns and Jim Brown in the funny, pointed documentary Radiant City.

Ooops! Scratch that. Although Radiant City has all the earmarks of a documentary, right down to the occasional comments by planning experts who appear throughout the film to offer advice on how to build — or reinvent — a better suburban landscape, the five-member family at its heart are actors. They play their parts with such realism, though, you’d swear the Moss family, who live in one of the huge new housing developments that sprawl outside Toronto, was a real family that’s coming unglued by suburbia.

Mother Anne Moss, who spurred the family’s move to the suburbs to get a bigger and affordable place, is hoping her subdivision, called Evergreen, will one day grow into a real community. The experts doubt it because Evergreen, like all the other cutely named subdivisions, is not a real place. There’s no there there. After a year of living in the still uncompleted tract, where empty lots and foundation walls sit next to finished houses, she still doesn’t know her neighbors. She spends hours organizing and updating her kitchen chart to show where each family member needs to be on a particular day at a particular time and whether it is she or husband Evan who will be responsible for ferrying their kids to wherever they must go.

Evan, whose second car is the lynchpin to making the complex family mobility system work, there being precious little public transit serving Evergreen, is less enchanted with life in the suburbs. He hates his daily two-hour commute. His car often breaks down, sending the whole family scurrying for another way to get from point A to point B.

The two eldest children hate the suburbs, too. Daughter Jennifer and her girlfriend complain that they know no one in their neighborhood and must take buses to get anywhere. In one funny sequence, the action is speeded up to show Jennifer and her friend on a long bus ride in which not a word is exchanged between them. Meanwhile, the mother suffers the brunt of the criticism, growing especially prickly when Evan takes a lead role in a community theater production of a musical play that makes fun of suburban life.

While the experts point out that suburban living, with its big houses and need for automobiles in the face of an ongoing energy crisis, “is the greatest miscalculation of resources in the history of the world,” the suburban subdivisions continue to mushroom. It may not end well for any of us, but Radiant City gives it a funny ride.

Radiant City will be screened at 9:30 p.m. tomorrow and 1:30 p.m. Thursday at the Opera House Cinemas as part of the Newport International Film Festival. Tickets are $10. They are on sale at the festival box office, 42 Spring St. (401) 846-4830 or online at www.newportfilmfestival.com.