De Kinderen van Amsterdam

Unarmed Verses

Toronto filmmaker Charles Officer profiles the young people of Villaways Park, a housing project on brink of historic change.

Anatomy of Los Angeles

This documentary explores the complexities of Los Angeles. Blending a highly structured montage of shots exploring the city with interviews of students, the writer Henry Miller, and residents from all communities, this evocation of Angelenos' city paints a portrait of a living, constantly evolving entity.

City by the Sea, or how to survive in Venice

Yannick Bellon's documentary paints a portrait of a city torn between the problem of unsanitary housing, pollution corroding walls and statues, and the recurring and increasing floods—all consequences of human activity. Faced with job shortages and rampant speculation, the overarching question arises of how industries can coexist with the city of Venice. Allowing them to develop risks destroying it; driving them out risks turning it into a museum, causing its inhabitants, and thus its soul, to leave.

Mes voisins sauvages

You don't have to travel to faraway countries to observe wildlife, because the fauna of the big city also provides surprises every day. Contrary to expectations, many bird, mammal and insect species have adapted to the concrete jungle. They have become experts of the urban space. “My Wild Neighbors” takes a poetic look at the lives of animals in the city.

Acasă, My Home

In the wilderness of the Bucharest Delta, nine children and their parents lived in perfect harmony with nature for 20 years – until they are chased out and forced to adapt to life in the big city.

Little White Lie

Lacey Schwartz grew up in a typical upper-middle-class Jewish household in Woodstock, NY, with loving parents and a strong sense of her Jewish identity - despite the open questions from those around her about how a white girl could have such dark skin. She believes her family's explanation that her looks were inherited from her dark-skinned Sicilian grandfather. But when her parents abruptly split, her gut starts to tell her something different. At age of 18, she finally confronts her mother and learns the truth: her biological father was not the man who raised her, but a black man named Rodney with whom her mother had had an affair.

Hotel Mokum

Pak Mokum Terug is the name of a group of Amsterdam activists that refuse to accept that the basic right to housing no longer appears to apply. The group’s name means “Take Back Amsterdam,” Mokum being the traditional nickname for a capital city in which today, for more and more people, a home is becoming unaffordable. Against this background, Hotel Mokum reports on the squatting of a dilapidated hotel in the city center, narrated in the voice of a fictitious activist.

La ciudad es nuestra

Feneen

FENEEN is a journey into Senegal's urban music scene. This project was born from the meeting of Italian producer Frank Sativa with Senegalese pop-star Leuz Diwane G and Italian-Senegalese rapper F.U.L.A. This gave rise to a song, a video clip and a documentary with the same name (Feneen). Feneen portrays the current urban and music subculture of Dakar suburbs. The documentary highlights the fundamental rule of the urban subculture in debunking the stereotypical image of the African continent.

Corvin variációk

Beyonce & Jay-Z: Power Love

A merger of megastar music. Discover the story of multi-genre performer and fashion promoter, Beyonce Knowles sand the world's first hip hop billionaire, Jay-Z.

La grande roue

Bicycle

Rhythmic composition of moving photographs of cyclists in Amsterdam, ‘set’ to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.

Radiant City

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

Chronicle of a City

A patchwork of millions of lives, urban spaces are not only streets and concrete. They are where our dreams and deepest worries unfold. Chronicle of a City drifts and strolls through time and chance encounters, moving between fantasy and reality, echoing the intimate and ghostly voices of our metropolises, reminding us that we inhabit The City as much as it inhabits us. This roaming essay is a visual and sonic meditation that invites us to see urban life as a web of sensations that move through us and draw us closer to one another, even in the midst of solitude.

Caged Men: Tales from Chicago's SRO Hotels

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.

Canicule 2003 : Paris dans la fournaise

The heatwave of 2003 remains etched in our memories. We remember an angry emergency doctor, crowded hospital corridors, and a health minister in a polo shirt who seemed completely out of touch with reality. Between August 1 and 20, 2003, the heatwave claimed 15,000 lives. One in three victims lived in the Ile-de-France region, which was hardest hit by this deadly heatwave. This tragedy revealed many shortcomings. First, the lack of preparedness of the public authorities to deal with such a health crisis. Second, the way in which the elderly are treated. Climatologists estimate that from 2050 onwards, the summer of 2003 will be the norm. Hyper-urbanization, poor insulation in homes, and a lack of green spaces are all factors that exacerbate the effects of high temperatures.

Fall 2

Bas Jan Ader rides his bike into a canal in Amsterdam.

Rue de Blamage

The Baselstrasse is a street in Lucerne. People call it "Rue de Blamage" – it's a noisy street tucked into a narrow space between a hill and a train track. The people who live here don't usually mingle with the rich and famous, but even the roughest haunt can be a home to those who live and work there – and Baselstrasse's two kilometers of asphalt are no different.

The Pigeon

Every day, Catherine feeds and cares for the pigeons in Place Beaubourg, under the curious gaze of the passersby.