Thread
Cities & Landscapes
3 films
From Asia to Africa to America, the films in this thread explore the politics embedded in land and urban space, uncovering histories of dispossession, exile, extraction, marginalisation, and conflict. These essay films demonstrate and theorise that cities and landscapes are never merely backgrounds against which larger histories unfold; they are spaces shaped, marked, and embodied by social systems. Through the camera lens, these systems become tangible, inscribed in the world of both past and present.
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Two channels trace a North Korean defector’s forty-day escape from imprisonment in Northeast China, showing us dense landscapes layered with historical and contemporary significance.
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In the Congo Basin, two scientists and an unlikely third voice reveal colonialism's enduring legacy through the intertwined exploitation of individuals and the environment.
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A landmark essay film in which director Masao Adachi reconstructs the life of a teenage murderer through the spaces he once traversed, rejecting sensationalism and using landscapes as his primary subject, offering meditations on violence and the political forces embedded in everyday life.
