Father of the City

Babylone, la cité des merveilles

A boy from Vila do Conde records a love letter on a cassette. His voice blends with music, archive images and stories from the past, some lived and others heard.

In Humberstone (Chile), little was left of the saltpeter's prosperity. Near the old Fordlandia (PA), squatter houses are the last signs of the city built by Henry Ford. Armero (Colombia), had its population wiped out by the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano in 1985. Twenty-five years after a flood, ruins of Villa Epecuén (Argentina) expose the remains of the old water station.

Since the end of World War II, one of kind of urban residential development has dominate how cities in North America have grown, the suburbs. In these artificial neighborhoods, there is a sense of careless sprawl in an car dominated culture that ineffectually tries to create the more organically grown older communities. Interspersed with the comments of various experts about the nature of suburbia

Ramses II : La Vérité sur le plus grand des pharaons

Sylvia Kristel – Paris is a portrait of Sylvia Kristel , best known for her role in the 1970’s erotic cult classic Emmanuelle, as well as a film about the impossibility of memory in relation to biography. Between November 2000 and June 2002 Manon de Boer recorded the stories and memories of Kristel. At each recording session she asked her to speak about a city where Kristel has lived: Paris, Los Angeles, Brussels or Amsterdam; over the two years she spoke on several occasions about the same city. At first glance the collection of stories appears to make up a sort of biography, but over time it shows the impossibility of biography: the impossibility of ‘plotting’ somebody’s life as a coherent narrative.

A day in the city of Berlin, which experienced an industrial boom in the 1920s, and still provides an insight into the living and working conditions at that time. Germany had just recovered a little from the worst consequences of the First World War, the great economic crisis was still a few years away and Hitler was not yet an issue at the time.

A docu-art film about Kyiv and the contemporary problems of the capital. The film raises the issue of the dilapidated state of Kyiv's old buildings and the search for effective mechanisms to preserve the city's architectural heritage.

Summer 2021, in Damascus city, some young emerging directors roamed the city's streets to follow their dreams and shoot their first movies with the simplest available tools. so, the city would open her arms and hug them day and night with her streets and neighborhoods.

"A Respectable Life" - A decade has gone by and the spirit of the preceding film, Dom kallar oss mods, has disappeared. Kenta is an alcoholic and lives with his girlfriend Eva. Together they have a son, Patric. Kenta's mom is in jail for manslaughter and Kenta goes to Kronoberg to greet her. Heroin also comes to play and Stoffe is one of those who falls victim to it. He lives with his girlfriend Lena and their young son, Janne. Lena later throws Stoffe out their home when she gets enough of his abuse, and he is forced to live with his mother. Kenta calls Stoffe and decides to meet him, and he tries to persuade him to give up heroin, but the two have a falling out and they separate. This film features other users from the previous film, such as Jajje and Kenta Bergkvist. The film ends with the death of a prominent person in the trilogy.

Misfits to Yuppies is the last of three films (Dom kallar oss mods, Ett anständigt liv, Det sociala arvet) that shows conditions for addicts in Stockholm and try to find out how social legacy have been transferred to their children from previous films.

Corvin variációk

About Stefan Stricker, who calls himself Juwelia and has been running a gallery on Sanderstraße in Berlin Neukölln for many years. Every weekend he invites guests to shamelessly recount from his life and to sing poetic songs written with his friend from Hollywood Jose Promis. Juwelia has been poor and sexy all her life, has always struggled for recognition, but only partially.

La ciudad es nuestra

Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City reveals the fascinating life and complex legacy of architect and city planner Daniel Hudson Burnham. In the midst of the late nineteenth century urban disorder, Burnham offered a powerful vision of what a civilized American city could look like, one that provided a compelling framework for Americans to make sense of the world around them. A timely, intriguing story in the American experience, Make No Little Plans explores Burnham's impact on the development of the American city as debate continues today about what urban planning means in a democratic society.

Jugaad is a Hindi word that can be translated as "innovative or effective solution that bends the rules". It refers to the extreme capacity developed by Mumbai's inhabitants to adapt and get around any type of constraint or obstacle posed by the city's urban structure. In a relatively small piece of land where 21 million people live today, the inhabitants of Mumbai demonstrate great creativity when it comes to managing the spaces (for sale, for prayer, for traffic) and the flows that cross them every day. Without using language, Hong Kong artist Chak Hin Leung brings together in this video a dozen unique situations in which people, animals, vehicles and natural elements intermingle and brush up against each other, without ever colliding.

This feature documentary takes a look at how the Halifax/Dartmouth community in Nova Scotia was stimulated by a week-long session held by a panel of specialists from different fields who met with members of this urban community to consider the future of the area and the responsibility of the citizens and government in planning the future.

The fifth movie of the kids from a school class in Jordbrovägen which the director has followed for over 24 years allows the now adult children through interviews talking about their lives. This is interspersed with inklipp from their everyday life and work, as well as clips from the previous movies.

Caged. Invisible. Shamed. Trapped. These words mark the tenants, clerks and even the owners of Chicago's last remaining Singe Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels. These small spaces are home for many at the bottom of Chicago's housing ladder. Cloaked in darkness and secrecy, these hotels are often maligned as drug dens and havens for prostitution but the people who live, work and own these hotels have never fully shared their stories. Caged Men is a feature-length documentary which examines the disquieting stories of near-homeless Americans living on the margins and their invisibility in a largely indifferent and, at times, hostile community. It attempts to lend a voice to SRO residents, clerks, owners and to the hotels themselves.

The Californian sun, which lights up the city, lights up again every evening in cinemas all over the world". Guided by these words from Blaise Cendrars, L.A. L.A. END is a stroll through Los Angeles, among the remnants of Hollywood's Golden Age. Following in the footsteps of a Marilyn Monroe lookalike, we meet a gallery of characters who paint a sensitive portrait of a bygone era that gradually becomes a portrait of a woman.