Movies: Urbanism

Takumi and his daughter Hana live in Mizubiki Village, close to Tokyo. One day, the village inhabitants become aware of a plan to build a camping site near Takumi's house offering city residents a comfortable "escape" to nature....

Nanni Moretti recalls in his diary three slice of life stories characterized by a sharply ironic look: in the first one he wanders through a deserted Rome, in the second he visits a reclusive friend on an island, and in the last he has to grapple wit...

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....

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Amina, Sami and Jennyfer are high school students in the Paris suburbs, in 93. At the initiative of 3 of their teachers, they embark on an unexpected investigation into a gigantic leisure park project which involves concreting agricultural land near...

Sundance award-winning director Julia Kwan’s documentary Everything Will Be captures the subtle nuances of a culturally diverse neighbourhood—Vancouver’s once thriving Chinatown—in the midst of transformation. The community’s oldest and newest member...

An ancestral house builds itself, comes to life, and shows us its story spanning one hundred fifty years. Through the ages, it allows us to perceive the passage of time....

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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 Manha...

A short documentary on the River Ouse, following it downstream from Lewes to Newhaven, meditating on the surrounding area....

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...

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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 g...

Documentary devoted to the architectural and urban planning designs of Le Corbusier. The architect supports his in-depth reflection on the city and its necessary adaptation to modern life with plans, drawings and images, particularly Paris, whose rev...

This haunting, beautifully crafted animation is set in a not-so-distant dystopia where lonely, suspicious pack dogs set the boundaries of their world amidst the remains of human presence. Within the confines of this border, the best and worst of anim...

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...

Under Dorchester Square in Montreal lies the cemetery where 55,000 people were buried in the 19th century. The square is still at the heart of social conflicts in Quebec, 150 years later....

Just a stone’s throw from downtown Montreal is the largest social housing complex in Quebec. Built in 1959 where the red-light district used to be, Les Habitations Jeanne-Mance have retained something of the area’s seedy reputation for poverty, prost...

Picture Perfect Pyramid is a 16mm film which in counter-clockwise spirals, circles a large pyramid structure that was built on the outskirts of Vienna in 1983. Using twenty-four positions the film was shot over the course of an entire day, with one s...

The human side of town planning, as exemplified in Baltimore, Maryland. The Coldspring Project concerned a proposed housing development for lower and upper income levels on a three hundred-acre site adjoining a wildlife sanctuary. The film records th...