According to Tony Giacinti, the filmmaker, the opening scenes of "Place" show footage of Robson Street (between Burrard and Thurlow) in the midst of being torn apart to make way for commercialization. Giacinti lived in the "Manhattan" apartment at the time. It was an experimental film, as influenced by the experimental filmmakers then teaching the workshop (e.g., Al Razutis). The film won in the "Experimental" category at the 11th Canadian Student Film Festival in Montreal in 1979.

A review of the film stated that "'Place' develops its own language of experimental editing and sound manipulations in order to explore the personna [sic] of an apartment block. In Tony's film objects and people, moving unseeing to each other in space and time, are brought together to create a strange statement about our perception of an observable reality." (Russell Stephens, "Move over, Fassbinder," The Peak, 13 June 1979, p. 7). The film was described as "Man and his Mask; the persona of the place in which we live" in the program for the 1978/79 SFU Student Workshop Films showing on 15 June 1979.