Back in 1965, then–U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson had this to say of the billboard-advertising industry: "I have never seen such a goddamn group of selfish, eager hogs." This was when he was putting together his Highway Beautification Act, the purpose of which was, mainly, to control outdoor advertising, mostly billboards.

Of course, the U.S. being the U.S., those hogs found ways to undermine, weaken, and poke holes through Johnson’s (really Lady Bird’s) legislation during subsequent years, and this is brought up as both a cautionary tale and tool of encouragement in an indie documentary, This Space Available, that is featured in this year’s Projecting Change Film Festival (April 24 to 28).

Rookie doc director Gwenaëlle Gobé visited 11 countries on five continents to amass 240 hours of film that she pared down to this effective 90-minute documentary first released in 2011 (but being screened in Vancouver for the first time).

The ubiquity of outdoor advertising—whether billboards, banners on buildings, or endless layers of posters slapped up on every urban hoarding or utilizable vacant space, legal or not—has given birth to a largely unorganized (internationally) but growing movement of activists hitting back at the visual pollution, especially the illegal kind.

The Los Angeles–based Gobé shows how Sao Paulo, the world’s eighth-largest city, has banned billboards, and how Houston, Texas, did the same more than 30 years ago. She tours L.A. and New York to demonstrate the kind of skyline clutter that is foreign to Vancouverites (despite Kingsway), and she tags along while locally organized activists (notably those led by New York’s Jordan Seiler, who also visits Toronto) target illegal posters and signage with paint, whitewash, and donated artworks.

That four of Seiler’s volunteers are arrested while the law ignores the illegal posters speaks volumes about the influence of an industry that took in $6.1 billion in revenues in the U.S. alone in 2010, money that mostly went to four companies that own 80 percent of all the billboards in that country (including JCDecaux, which seems to have made a rare miscalculation in its vigorous chase years back for Vancouver’s anemic bus-shelter-ad franchise).

Dozens of knowledgeable and entertaining talking heads bolster this informative doc (did you know that one digital billboard can require the average annual power needs of 14 houses?), which occasionally veers into Ron Fricke/Philip Glass territory with its time-lapse cityscapes and energetic minimalist score, but Koyaanisqatsi comparisons stop there. Where that historic immersive experience was more meditative than a call to action, This Space Available educates and lays out the options for future sorties.

As one interviewee says of the L.A. eyesores: "We take your eyeballs without paying you." Maybe it’s time to emulate the mayors of Sao Paulo and Houston and take them back.

Or send them the bill.

This Space Available plays tonight (April 25) at the Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, SFU downtown (149 West Hastings Street) at 7 p.m. Director Gwenaëlle Gobé will attend the screening. (A special "industry" screening at 4 p.m. will be followed by a networking reception with Gobé at 5:30 p.m.)