1. La Meilleure Façon de tracer (La Meilleure Façon de tracer)
(La Meilleure Façon de tracer)
2. Neighbor by Neighbor: Mobilizing an Invisible Community in Lewiston, Maine
In the summer of 2004, the Mayor of Lewiston, Maine announced a plan to develop a four-lane boulevard across downtown's low-income neighborhood. This project was called "The Heritage Initiative." Contrary to its name, this plan was going to eliminate the downtown's heritage by displacing 850 people from their homes as well as destroy playgrounds, vegetable gardens, and historic buildings. Moving residents out of the city and improving traffic flow was at the heart of this proposal... It was 1960's Urban Renewal all over again. As tragic as the circumstances were, the threat of a road destroying the neighborhood required residents to rise to the challenge of becoming *community organizers. This movie documents 5 years of development and community organizing in Lewiston. It's an exceptional story about the people of Lewiston, but it's also a universal story about the challenges faced by many urban neighborhoods across the United States.
3. Operation: Jane Walk
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.
It has an average vote of 4 on TMDB.
4. La Alameda (La Alameda)
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.
5. New Towns for Old
Sheffield stands in as 'Smokedale', an industrial Everytown, in this stirring call for "new schools, new hospitals, new roads, new life", after WWII.
6. Uma Cidade Chamada Tiradentes (Uma Cidade Chamada Tiradentes)
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.
7. Little Burgundy (La P'tite Bourgogne)
"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
It has an average vote of 10 on TMDB.
8. Grand Littoral (Grand Littoral)
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.
9. A Short History of the Highrise
“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 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 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.
10. The heart of Caracas (El corazón de Caracas)
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.
11. The Block (Blokka)
In central Oslo, Egil and his neighbors in an apartment block are threatened with losing their rented flats to a billionaire raiding such old apartment blocks around Oslo, just as he has done all over Northern Europe. We face the harsh reality of living on the wrong side of the shiny welfare state in one of the world’s wealthiest countries. The film portrays what happens when a group of people constantly live in fear of being thrown out of their homes in an affluent society.
It has an average vote of 7 on TMDB.
12. Jaime Lerner - Uma História de Sonhos (Jaime Lerner - Uma História de Sonhos)
(Jaime Lerner - Uma História de Sonhos)
13. Amancio Williams
A biography documentary of the Argentine modernist architect Amancio Williams.
It has an average vote of 5.3 on TMDB.
14. Dandara: Enquanto Morar for um Privilégio, Ocupar é um Direito (Dandara: Enquanto Morar for um Privilégio, Ocupar é um Direito)
(Dandara: Enquanto Morar for um Privilégio, Ocupar é um Direito)
It has an average vote of 10 on TMDB.
15. Snow Fighters
A close-up of a snow-bound city, and the men, money and machinery it takes to dig it out.
16. Citizen Jane: Battle for the City
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.
It has an average vote of 6.7 on TMDB.
17. The People of the Kattawapiskak River
Alanis Obomsawin’s documentary The People of the Kattawapiskak River exposes the housing crisis faced by 1,700 Cree in Northern Ontario, a situation that led Attawapiskat’s band chief, Theresa Spence, to ask the Canadian Red Cross for help. With the Idle No More movement making front page headlines, this film provides background and context for one aspect of the growing crisis.
18. Alternate Spaces
A short documentary on the River Ouse, following it downstream from Lewes to Newhaven, meditating on the surrounding area.
19. Megalópolis (Megalópolis)
Exploration of the territory in a delirious time-space journey through the largest Megalopolis in America.
20. A Capital Plan
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.