Canada is facing a housing crisis, and cooperative housing might be a part of the solution.
Social & External
Narrator (voice)
"Ellas en la ciudad" (Them in the City) focuses on the first settlers of the neighborhoods on the outskirts of Seville. Through their stories, we discover that they have been the backbone of a city that has turned its back on them.
Author and activist Jane Jacobs talks about the problems and virtues of North American cities.
This short documentary depicts the formation in 1959 of the first successful co-operative in an Inuit community in Northern Québec. The film describes how, with other Inuit of the George River community, the Annanacks formed a joint venture that included a sawmill, a fish-freezing plant and a small boat-building industry.
A biography documentary of the Argentine modernist architect Amancio Williams.
Homelessness in the United States takes many forms. For Elizabeth Herrera, David Lima and their four children, housing instability has meant moving between unsafe apartments, motels, relatives’ couches, shelters, the streets and their car. After 15 years of this uncertainty, the family moved into their first stable housing — an apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area — in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
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?
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 of the area and the responsibility of the citizens and government in planning the future.
Between 1968 and 1970, J M Goodger, a lecturer at the University of Salford, made a film record of the living conditions in the slums of Ordsall, Salford, which were then in the process of being demolished. Under the title 'The Changing face of Salford', the film was in two parts: 'Life in the slums' and 'Bloody slums'.
Departing from peripheral details of some paintings of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a female narrator unravels several stories related to the economic, social and psychological conditions of past and current artists.
This full-length documentary from the Challenge for Change program addresses housing issues affecting Montreal in the mid-1970s. As the city is restoring older apartments through direct action and government subsidies, new, low-rent housing is being integrated into old neighborhoods.
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.
This short documentary examines the complex range of issues affecting urban transport in developing countries. After examining cost and available technology, as well as the different needs of the industrialized middle class and the urban poor, the film proposes some surprising solutions.
A movie about the history of the Gustavsberg porcelain company.
PROJEKT A is a documentary that resists the common clichés about anarchism to instead show anarchist ideas of a society in which no one shall have the power to control knowledge, natural resources, land, soil or other people. After inspiring over 25,000 German cinema-goers, this award-winning documentary about anarchism and anarchist projects in Europe is now available on VoD! “Projekt A stirs up the audience and is grippingly shot, getting close to the kinds of tenacious people who are so vital to change in our society.” (kinokino) “…a cinematic portrait, not of anarchy, but of anarchists. A story, not of possibilities, necessities or even failure, but a depiction of achievements, initiative, action, ideas, as well as success.” (kino-zeit.de) Audience Award Filmfest Munich
Amid a severe housing crisis that made international headlines in 2011, the federal government imposed third-party management on the Attawapiskat First Nation. In response, the First Nation’s leadership filed a challenge in federal court, claiming the appointment was unreasonable, contrary to law and harmful to community members. Alanis Obomsawin documents the remarkable judicial review that ensued in April 2012 in this companion work to her feature documentary The People of the Kattawapiskak River.
"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
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.
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.
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