COVID-19 pandemic re-actualized the issue of housing for the majority of the world's population. In 2020, rental strikes took place in the United States and Italy. At the same time the phrase 'cancel rent' consolidated the efforts of thousands of activists who demanded landlords to cancel their quarantine rent.
The films of this program tell about the struggle for the right to housing in several countries. And that gentrification is not about the development of business, infrastructure, and social life. It is rather about the displacement and eviction of people from their homes. The consequences developers and authorities tend to ignore.
Curated by Lena Syrbu
THIS IS MY LAND…
Salvador Miranda
Netherlands | 2019, 8 min
This is my land… is an experimental 2-channel film examining the trial of a woman whose home is threatened by a new development project. Her ideas of home, community and utopia are examined alongside those of the Developer, who acts as a witness in the trial. The film explores the use of language and rhetoric, as well as competing visions of progress and development.
BEFORE OUR TIME COMES
Chloé Terren
France | 2019, 22 min
Raphaël takes care of his grandmother's flat as she stays in a nursing home. He tells her what happens to the neighbors, what he sees through the window. But an urbanization project is underway and the towers are strangely getting empty... Raphaël, who doesn’t dare to tell the truth, began to lie.
VERONICA
Talita Caselato
Brazil | 2020, 14 min
Dynamic portrait of the metropolis of São Paulo and of the activist Veronica Oliveira in her gentrifying neighbourhood. From a historical perspective, cleaning is often associated with slavery. Her Faxina Boa project fights for a positive, respectful approach to the profession.
THE HOUSES WE WERE
Arianna Lodeserto
Italy | 2018, 18 min
The first 50 years of the Low-Income Housing Institute created a veritable city within a city to deal with what has been and still remains the main and persistent problem of Rome: housing. But what is this city made of? Who gets left out?
The archives respond. The archives reassert.
MR. SMOKE
Nicolas Bouchez
Portugal | 2019, 8 min
Mr. Smoke and his bookshop try to survive in a city growing above them. The oldest bookseller of Lisbon has already received several eviction letters, but won’t leave his shop before he sold the 20 000 books he still has inside.
THE STRANGER
Valeria Stucki
Spain | 2020, 15 min
In an atmosphere of a summery siesta, a novel foreign architect encounters the female neighbours of a Spanish working-class district that is about to be demolished. A daytime fable of ghosts from another time.