
18 Nov 2013

Amancio Williams
A biography documentary of the Argentine modernist architect Amancio Williams.
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, prostitution, drugs and violence. But who really knows the projects and the people who live there? Delving beneath the prejudices and stereotypes, director Isabelle Longtin ventured inside the buildings and met the residents.

18 Nov 2013

A biography documentary of the Argentine modernist architect Amancio Williams.

01 Jan 1971

Author and activist Jane Jacobs talks about the problems and virtues of North American cities.
No overview found

01 May 2017

Toronto filmmaker Charles Officer profiles the young people of Villaways Park, a housing project on brink of historic change.
via print and film, love and music, state propaganda and people's archives, five-year plans and Emergency.

11 Jan 2025

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.

26 Jan 2020

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.

10 Jun 1978

This documentary is a portrait of Point St. Charles, one of Montreal’s notoriously bleak neighbourhoods. Many of the residents are English-speaking and of Irish origin; many of them are also on welfare. Considered to be one of the toughest districts in all of Canada, Point St. Charles is poor in terms of community facilities, but still full of rich contrasts and high spirits – that is, most of the time.

04 Sep 1984

David Jones investigates how 1960s council housing came to be built so poorly that thousands later needed to be demolished.

31 Dec 1957

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 revolutionary development dreamed of by Le Corbusier is exhibited here. Its first projects will remain at the stage of a model: the modernization plan for the city of Algiers. Some will be created by other architects: Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro, UN Palace in New York. From the post-war period in less than 10 years, Le Corbusier created large housing units in Marseille, Nantes, a chapel in Ronchamps, a factory in Saint-Dié, a town in Chandigarh in India. Through diagrams, the architect presents his theory of the "radiant city", the mathematical key modulor of his work as well as his project for reorganizing the countryside, industrial and urban cities into a grouping around a cooperative system.

21 Nov 2014

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.

28 Apr 2014

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 members offer their intimate perspectives on the shifting landscape as they reflect on change, memory and legacy. Night and day, a neon sign that reads "EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT" looms over Chinatown. Everything is going to be alright, indeed, but the big question is for whom?

01 Jan 1967

This short documentary film is a fascinating portrait of urban and rural Quebec in the late 1960s, as the province entered modernity. The collective work produced for the Quebec Ministry of Industry and Commerce calls on several major Quebec figures.

30 May 2007

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

01 Dec 2021

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.

01 Apr 1975

In buildings where foreign workers lived in Germany, there were strict rules of conduct, defined by the house rules and supervised by the building superintendents. Many rights regarding the freedom of movement, communication and behavior were abused. Interviews with the tenants and with the "orderlies" which point out absurd situations and clashes caused by these restrictions.

25 Jul 2021

Tokyo, the largest city in the world, wants to create a new urban culture. It is returning to the urban traditions and building techniques of the small town. The aim is to create a new balance between megacity and small-scale garden city. Tokyo's architects are the driving force. They want to create a new urban culture with revolutionary ideas.

01 Jan 1974

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 the differences aired in meetings of various interest groups that tried to modify the plan according to their views, and the compromise reached, based on plans drawn up by Montréal architect Moshe Safdie.

15 Dec 2022

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

01 Jan 2011

Join the enchanting journey as a city awakens, its components harmonizing in a grand symphony of self-expression, where every brick, tree, and whisper shapes its own destiny.