Urban Studies

Khadija (Saadia Bentaïeb) is a fifty-eight-year-old Maghrebi cleaning woman living in Brussels in the wake of the 2016 bombings that shook the city. After work one night, she falls asleep on the last subway train, wakes up at the end of the line and has no choice but to make her way home—all the way across the city—on foot.

The Fourth Kingdom: The Kingdom of Plastics is a compassionate through-the-seasons study of a non-profit recycling and redemption center in New York.

Hao (Mason Lee) is part of a team of young engineers called in to investigate a series of craters that have opened up on the edge of the city. As he and his team survey the subsiding area, another story is taking place in the same suburban landscape. A younger boy, also named Hao, spends long afternoons playing with friends and making mischief until one-by-one, his playmates start to disappear. As these parallel stories unfold, the connections between them proliferate and grow stranger. 

From acclaimed director Wang Xiaoshuai (Beijing Bicycle; So Long, My Son) comes a personal snapshot of contemporary China in all its diversity. Shot over the course of ten years on both film and video, the film consists of a series of carefully composed tableaus of people and environments, each one more extraordinary than the last. 

Pulling from real events and court documents in the wake of the 2015 Paris terror attacks, Also Known As Jihadi follows a young man's journey to radicalism not through his actions, but through his surroundings. 

Owned: A Tale of Two Americas is a fever dream vision into the dark history behind the US housing economy. Tracking its overtly racist beginnings to its unbridled commoditization, the film exposes a foundational story few Americans understand as their own.

A documentary that uses the rat to explore the complicated history of Baltimore and how racial segregation, redlining, and environmental racism built the American city we see today.

A complex tale of social justice, urban forestry and community politics, City of Trees portrays the struggles of a DC non-profit to challenge the cycle of poverty and violence in blighted urban areas by implementing an ambitious "green jobs" program that hires 150 unemployed residents to plant trees in underserved parks.

In fifteen linked chapters shot in locations ranging from Moscow to New York to Istanbul, Counting merges city symphony, diary film, and personal/political essay to create a vivid portrait of contemporary life.

From the producers of the Academy Award winning documentary Inocente, 1 Way Up tells the inspirational story of two teenage boys hoping to escape one of the toughest gang neighborhoods in London with the only thing they have—a bike.

Executive produced by Steve James (The Interrupters, Life Itself), Lucky is an unforgettable portrait of a young Puerto Rican woman, a single mother, homeless, and struggling to find work, yet still passionately dreaming of true love and success. Filmed over six years, the film powerfully brings to light a myriad of social issues such as the flaws of foster care and social services, systemic poverty, urban blight, homelessness and LGBT discrimination.

Never before available, Thom Andersen's landmark documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself explores the tangled relationship between the movies and their fabled hometown – as seen entirely though the films themselves.Newly remastered, this kaleidoscopic tour through the metropolis' real and cinematic history, from the silent era to modern times, is an extraordinary achievement, unlike any documentary that has come before or since.

A master of the essay film, Thom Andersen (Los Angeles Plays Itself, Red Hollywood) surveys the work of Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura - winner of his profession's highest honor, the Pritzker Prize - whose astonishing, often-controversial projects embrace decay, the passage of time, local history, and nature.

Focusing on a vast demolition site in the center of Chengdu, the Sichuan capital in western China, a bustling site emblematic of the rapid growth and development occurring throughout the country, J.P. Sniadecki’s Demolition is a wonderfully patient and revealing portrait of the migrant laborers who work and live in its shadow.

Blending autobiographical monologues, intimate conversations, and staged performances, Lynne Sachs' Your Day Is My Night documents the lives of Chinese immigrants sharing a "shift-bed" apartment in the heart of New York City's Chinatown, offering a deeply felt portrait of the Asian-American immigrant experience.

A documentary about greed, politics, urban development and renewal, the award-winning Zipper: Coney Island's Last Wild Ride is an absorbing chronicle of the efforts to redevelop an iconic American landmark, Coney Island.

Clinging to the last affordable housing in a rapidly gentrifying city, a determined group of neighbors come together when the city claims eminent domain over their land in order to build a new school. An absorbing look at the complex issues surrounding urban planning, gentrification and economic renewal.