Everybody in the city of Havana knows that it’s better to walk in the middle of the street and not on the sidewalk, where you may be hit by a crumbling balcony. Still, the balcony is a loyal friend, connecting people with their neighbours, the hawkers, the noise and smell…
The lack of government regulation allows Ukrainians to build any balcony regardless of the style of the building, to the point that people sometimes rebuild them to be bigger than the apartment itself.The film explores the balcony as an informal architectural form that is uniquely Ukrainian. It is a journey…
When Rotterdam citizen Bep de Bruin is found dead in her home, lying there unnoticed for 10 years, the city is in shock. How could this happen? Ada (59) and her best friend Wilma (70) decide to volunteer for the local government’s response: a campaign against loneliness. Together, they go…
“Wilkommen, bienvenue,” the CEO sang in 2011 when BIG won the architecture competition for a large waste-to-energy plant with a ski slope on top. A camera has followed the process since the tentative beginnings of what became known – from the very first sod cut – as a visionary project…
The award winner Japanese architect Toyo Ito designed the International Baroque Museum in Puebla, Mexico. Nobody knew how to build this project until a team of Mexican constructors accepted the challenge, after two years of searching for someone capable. It was necessary to invent a construction process and to improvise…
Amatrice, Chernobyl, Aleppo: three iconic disaster sites from modern history. Constructed as a cinematic triptych, Once the Dust Settles shows what happens when the dust has settled and the camera crews have left for new catastrophes. The film centers around the evocative stories of survivors who are now trying to…
Housing prices are skyrocketing in cities around the world. Incomes are not. PUSH sheds light on a new kind of faceless landlord, our increasingly unliveable cities and an escalating crisis that has an effect on us all. This is not gentrification, it’s a different kind of monster. The film follows…
As the Internet finally arrives in tiny Bhutan, documentarian Thomas Balmès is there to witness its transformative impact on a young Buddhist monk whose initial trepidation gives way to profound engagement with the technology. The film follows Peyangki in his rural monastery as he forms, via WeChat, a virtual relationship…
What inspires people to take the initiative and organize communal living themselves? What are the ideals behind it, how do they work out the financing, and how does communal life function? On the basis of six self-managed residential structures in Austria from across forty years, the documentary “Such Stuff As…
The River and the Wall follows five friends on an immersive adventure through the unknown wilds of the Texas borderlands as they travel 1200 miles from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico on horses, mountain bikes, and canoes. Conservation filmmaker Ben Masters realizes the urgency of documenting the last…
Walking on Water follows internationally renowned artist Christo on his quest to realize “The Floating Piers”, originally conceived in 1970 by Christo and his late wife and collaborator, Jeanne-Claude. In 2016, seven years after Jeanne-Claude’s death, this stunning, site-specific masterpiece was finally cleared to be mounted on Italy’s Lake Iseo,…
A city with a troubled history, that is trying to rebuild what it lost in the bombings of the Second World War, Dresda is from 2015 the scene of a startling phenomenon: the members of the right wing movement Pegida are marching every Monday evening down the streets of the…
