CAMBRIDGE — Ever while away a warm afternoon people-watching in a public park, and let your mind wander? Ever wonder how the couples lounging on blankets met? Why the guy who practices martial arts day after day does what he does? What motivates the sprinters who show up at the running track at the crack of dawn?
Federico Muchnik did. And then he went and asked.
“I just started taking my camera there and approaching folks,” said Muchnik, a Cambridge-based filmmaker who spent much of last year wandering through Danehy Park. “Everybody had a different story.”
In the 50-acre green space not far from Alewife station, the 63-year-old talked to the countless athletes, hobbyists, and lovebirds who crossed his path, and asked them to tell their tales on film.
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The result, a feature-length documentary called “OPEN SPACE,” premiers March 16 at the Cambridge Public Library.
Muchnik, who lives in Porter Square and ran for Cambridge City Council last year, said the idea to focus his attention on the park came to him during his campaign.
“I’d made it my job to get to know the folks at the corner store, and the mailman, and really understand that neighborhoods are sort of a life form,” he said. “So I had this epiphany.”
He didn’t win a seat on the council, but kept at it. Danehy Park seemed the perfect place to run into folks with time to spare.
This isn’t Mucnhnik’s first time focusing on life in Cambridge. He has also filmed the day-to-day life at a local youth center and the closure of the Harvard Square hole-in-the-wall known as The Tasty. In 2022, he released a short film about a local blind blues musician.
Perhaps because of his knack for getting people to open up on camera — or maybe because he chose to eschew fancy equipment and shoot nearly the entire project on an iPhone — the subjects he met in the park last year were candid. Conversations about sportsmanship, God, romance, police harassment, school shootings, grief, and loneliness all made their way into his film’s final cut.
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In one scene, he follows a preteen who is so devastated after coming up short in a Danehy soccer tournament that he looks like he’s just lost the World Cup. In others, he gets up close and personal with a father and son who bond while racing supercharged remote-controlled cars on a pathway, and a pair of older men who meet in the park to practice an obscure pastime called “freestyle Frisbee.”
Muchnik exchanged contact info with the people he filmed, and earlier this year invited them to a screening where they could offer feedback and, just as important, get to know one another, he said. Dozens showed up.
“There was a really nice chemistry with, you know, the martial arts guy hanging out with the soccer mom and the kickboxing coach hanging out with the Frisbee dudes,” he said.
Put together, he considers the clips as love letters to the park, and, big picture, to the way open spaces like it provide people who live nearby a peaceful escape from modern life.
“The lesson I took away is how important the park is to a population’s well-being. In a park, economic differences disappear, racial differences disappear,” he said. “In all the months I was filming, I never saw an argument.”
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Danehy Park wasn’t always so serene, or so green. Before it opened to the public in 1990, it had been a clay pit, then a city landfill.
Muchnik, who grew up in the city, remembers riding his bike on the dump’s piles of dirt-laden trash in the 1960s. “It was a great obstacle course,” he said. “But it was smoky, it was filthy, and it smelled like fire.”
He includes some history of the park’s gritty past life in the documentary, including a chat with a man who talks about how neighborhood kids used to prowl the dump, chucking cherry bombs into rat nests, then pelting the rodents who popped out of them with BB guns.
The vibe, clearly, has changed since then.
A yearslong revitalization effort transformed its 50 acres into a site for athletic fields, jogging, birding, and other recreational activities.
It significantly improved life in North Cambridge, said Beth Folsom, program manager for History Cambridge, which has also been talking with neighbors about the park this year as part of a research project.
“Pretty much everyone knows it used to be a waste site, even if they don’t know the details, and that sends a powerful message about reintegrating urban spaces, and that we can take control of what is in our community,” Folsom said. “It’s a physical sign of revitalization and resilience.”
The film, “OPEN SPACE: Life at Cambridge’s Danehy Park,” will debut at a free screening at Cambridge Public Library on March 16.
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Spencer Buell can be reached at spencer.buell@globe.com. Follow him @SpencerBuell.