"A welfare slum motel" and "a gypsy project," one woman calls it.
Her latest project, "Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County" (Monday night on HBO), is the first not to focus on politics or religion.
The Best Supporting Actor race appears to have the year's only lock: Willem Dafoe, as the beleaguered motel manager in "The Florida Project".
In one project, she envisioned barge motels floating down a Louisiana river poisoned by the petrochemical industry.
In July, Mr. Vieyra asked eight Kent State students to draft projects and work with motel owners to preserve the best of what they had while jazzing up some of the more mundane properties.
Last year, she purchased the motel for $700,000 and began a $5 million project to turn it into an upscale hotel called the Greenporter Hotel and Spa, which would add 28 overnight lodging rooms to the village's current 43.
But just like Beasts of the Southern Wild showed us Hurricane Katrina through the wide-eyed lens of childhood, The Florida Project crystallizes its world a dingy motel on the outskirts of Disney World into a garish, pastel purple wonderland.
Instead of pristine vistas, viewers were presented with tract houses, industrial sites, motels, warehouses and highway projects.
The artists present a humorous, at times melancholy, but always faithful vision of industrial landscapes, housing projects, roadside motels, interstates and abandoned buildings.
Once Brooks gets the motel torn down, he'll move to the next phase of the project: building a much-needed youth and community center on the same plot of land.
