Encounter on Urban Environment

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.

Everything Will Be

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?

Le Corbusier, l'architecte du bonheur

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.

Québec...?

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.

Du béton sur nos courgettes

The Coldspring Project

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.

Operation: Jane Walk

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.

Grand Littoral

Valérie Jouve is a weel-known photographer, and Grand Littoral is her first film. Out the outskirts of Marseille, in a landscape criss-crossed by motorways, railways and srubland paths, some figures that seem to be from her famous photos passby and bump into each other. They act as our guides in a tour without beginning or end. How do you look at a place without taking possession of it? How do you describe characters without confining them within a given plot? How do you make the transition from still shots to moving pictures? this brief, musical film leaves us asking these and other unresolved questions.

Alternate Spaces

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

Mobility

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.

Dorchester: au coeur de la mêlée

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.

Alliances Terrestres

Rabble Rousers: Frances Goldin and the Fight for Cooper Square

In 1959 New York City announced a "slum clearance plan" by Robert Moses that would displace 2,400 working class and immigrant families, and dozens of businesses, from the Cooper Square section of Manhattan's Lower East Side. Guided by the belief that urban renewal should benefit - not displace - residents, Frances Goldin and her neighbors formed the Cooper Square Committee and launched a campaign to save the neighborhood. Over five decades they fought politicians, developers, white flight, government abandonment, blight, violence, arson, drugs, and gentrification - cyclical forces that have destroyed so many working class neighborhoods across the US. Through tenacious organizing and hundreds of community meetings, they not only held their ground but also developed a vision of community control. Fifty three years later, they established the state's first community land trust - a diverse, permanently affordable neighborhood in the heart of the "real estate capital of the world."

Douce France

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 their homes. But can we have the power to act on a territory when we are 17 years old? Funny and intrepid, these new citizens take us to meet residents of their neighborhood, property developers, farmers and even elected officials of the National Assembly. A joyful quest that challenges conventional wisdom and revives our connection to the land!

A Capital Plan

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.

Brasília