Self
The twelfth edition of the International Meeting of Collective Architectures was held in Palma de Mallorca, in the neighborhoods of La Soledat, Nou Llevant and Es Molinar, at the end of September 2019. The meeting focused on the imposition of false paradises and the description of the current mechanisms of urban transformation that expel people from their neighborhoods.
Valérie Jouve is a weel-known photographer, and Grand Littoral is her first film. Out the outskirts of Marseille, in a landscape criss-crossed by motorways, railways and srubland paths, some figures that seem to be from her famous photos passby and bump into each other. They act as our guides in a tour without beginning or end. How do you look at a place without taking possession of it? How do you describe characters without confining them within a given plot? How do you make the transition from still shots to moving pictures? this brief, musical film leaves us asking these and other unresolved questions.
“A Short History of the Highrise” is an interactive documentary that explores the 2,500-year global history of vertical living and issues of social equality in an increasingly urbanized world. The centerpiece of the project is four short films. The first three (“Mud,” “Concrete” and “Glass”) draw on The New York Times's extraordinary visual archives, a repository of millions of photographs that have largely been unseen in decades. Each film is intended to evoke a chapter in a storybook, with rhyming narration and photographs brought to life with intricate animation. The fourth chapter (“Home”) comprises images submitted by the public. The interactive experience incorporates the films and, like a visual accordion, allows viewers to dig deeper into the project’s themes with additional archival materials, text and microgames.
"This film is one of the first French Unit productions of the “Société Nouvelle/Challenge for Change” program. When an old area of Montréal is to be demolished to make way for a new low-income housing development, is there anything the residents can do to protect their own interests? The film documents such a situation in the Little Burgundy district of Montréal and shows how the residents organized themselves into a committee that successfully influenced the city’s housing policy." - Anthology Film Archives
A documentary focusing on the rebuilding projects in Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Sitting at the intersection of two main arteries of traffic on Melbournes Northside is a giant yellow rat that is pointing, with a long gnarled claw, to its explicitly large bottom. This yellow rat is the mascot for the small business Glenlyon Motors. This unusual mascot and the absence of an explanation for its existence has many residents of Melbournes north side puzzled. 'A Rats Arse' finally answers the question on every Northside residents lips - “Why?!” - and along the way reveals something about identity, values, community, and the people who exist within them.
The war zone of a dystopian multiplayer shooting game is used to embark some urban explorers on a winter walk, avoiding the combats whenever possible, as peaceful observers, inhabitants of a digital world, which is a detailed replica of Midtown Manhattan.
Following a commission from the College of Architects of Seville, for the production of a documentary about the La Alameda de Hércules area of the Sevillian capital in a debate about its possible destiny and urban planning challenges, the filmmaker Juan Sebastián Bollaín, offers this visionary realistic and critical, at the same time experimental and iconoclastic, portrait of the problem of the transformation of historic centers in our cities.
This documentary presents a before-and-after picture of people in a large-scale public housing project in Toronto. Due to a housing shortage, they were forced to live in squalid, dingy flats and ramshackle dwellings on a crowded street in Regent Park North; now they have access to new, modern housing developments designed to offer them privacy, light and space.
The documentary offers an overview of the district of Cidade Tiradentes and its inhabitants. It starts by the acquisition of land by the public authorities from the 1970s onwards, to the occupation of what is today one of the largest housing projects in Latin America.
This full-length documentary from the Challenge for Change program addresses housing issues affecting Montreal in the mid-1970s. As the city is restoring older apartments through direct action and government subsidies, new, low-rent housing is being integrated into old neighborhoods.
Exploration of the territory in a delirious time-space journey through the largest Megalopolis in America.
This short documentary features a portrait of Ottawa in the mid-20th century, as the nascent Canadian capital grew with force but without direction. Street congestion, air pollution, and rail traffic were all the negative results of a city that had grown without being properly planned. French architect and urban designer Jacques Gréber stepped in to create a far-sighted plan for the future development of Ottawa. With tracks moved, factories relocated, and neighbourhoods redesigned as separate communities, Ottawa became the capital city of true beauty and dignity we know today.
Caracas has been changing since the nineteenth century this is a story that tries to explain why the Venezuelan capital is complex, chaotic and fertile. In light of these new evidences, community experiments, social awareness and organization of people, seem to be the necessary ingredients to rescue a metropolis that is not yet completely lost.
Writer and urban activist Jane Jacobs fights to save historic New York City during the ruthless redevelopment era of urban planner Robert Moses in the 1960s.
The Fall of the I-Hotel brings to life the battle for housing in San Francisco. The brutal eviction of the International Hotel's tenants culminated a decade of spirited resistance to the razing of Manilatown. The Fall of the I-Hotel works on several levels. It not only documents the struggle to save the I-Hotel, but also gives an overview of Filipino American history.
A short documentary on the River Ouse, following it downstream from Lewes to Newhaven, meditating on the surrounding area.
In recent years, the Marga Marga Province has witnessed a drastic change in the visual and sound landscape due to urban expansion. Faced with the observation and the need to explore the territory that seems more and more alien and less and less our own, the film functions as a material resource and support for plastic reflection on living in the midst of capitalist progress.