For Aesthetic Reasons

Architecture: A Performing Art

1979

This is the story of John Andrews, world-famous Australian architect. In the mid-1960s, when only 29, Andrews was commissioned to design Scarborough College at Toronto University. One of the world’s first ‘megastructures’, it was an important experiment in urban and educational planning. Andrews also designed the Canadian National Tower in Toronto, which was the tallest freestanding structure in the world at the time it was built.

Die Bauten Adolf Hitlers

1938

Nazi Third Reich propaganda film that used architecture as a statement about "racial accomplishment," and so called "racial superiority." Hitler claimed that between 1934 and 1940, the Nazi rule of Germany had produced architectural uniqueness, and this film was produced to shown to attempt to validate that. The opening montage gives a survey of earlier Gothic and Baroque structures in the country as an example of "architectural superiority" that the German race was said to be the sole inventor of; then moves on to deride the recent construction of the Bauhaus school (with a racially motivated score of Jazz music) and an example of German "architectural decay." Then proceeds to show off buildings constructed by the Nazi and an architectural revival, to "last 1000 years," Film also spends a great of time dwelling on massive and "busy" monuments that had been erected all over the county.

Son of Torum

1989

In the same vein as Meri's other documentations, this one takes advantage of the glasnost policy to discuss the social and ecologic impact of the Russian oil industry on the natives and the lands they inhabit.

Narratives of Modern Genocide

2021

Narratives of Modern Genocide challenges the audience to experience first-person accounts of survivors of genocide. Sichan Siv and Gilbert Tuhabonye share how they escaped the killing fields of Cambodia, and the massacre of school children in Burundi. Mixing haunting animation, and expert context the film confronts our notion that the holocaust was the last genocide.

The Unwanted: The Secret Windrush Files

2019

David Olusoga opens secret government files to show how the Windrush scandal and the ‘hostile environment’ for black British immigrants has been 70 years in the making.

A Home On the Clouds

2018

A couple receives a letter of eviction: they must leave their home in Trento within 60 days. They are two political refugees: he is Afghan and she is of Iranian origin. They have a 10-year-old son, Sepanta, who grew up in Italy, and has no memory of his grandparents, either paternal or maternal. They decide to dedicate these 60 days to their son, to offer him a different idea of home, and thus undertake a journey to his mother's native country. But an unexpected event upsets the plans.

A Visit to the Petite Maison

2015

This film was made in the summer of 2015 on the occasion of the exhibition "A Tribute to Le Corbusier" at the Villa "Le Lac" in Corseaux. We have recorded a visit to the Petite Maison of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in moving pictures and an audio track but without explanations. The film is patient, calm and curious: we hear the sound of steps, reverberations from the street nearby, doors and cabinets being opened and closed, and we see the flexible ways in which the house and its furnishings might be used. It is an attempt to illuminate and elucidate the lively “jeu, savant, correct et magnifique des volumes sous la lumière”.

La restanza

2021

Castiglione d'Otranto, in the South of Italy. A group of thirty-year-olds no longer accept that the solution to the economic, ecological and political problems of the territory is always "to leave". They propose to the villagers who own pieces of uncultivated land, often felt as a burden, to put them in common. They decide to stay, to link their lives to the land and to invest in a value: being together. Castiglione becomes the village of restance. They cultivate ancient seeds and local biodiversity, they make decisions together, they develop a local economy. Accepting the shadows of the past, another potential of the place is rediscovered.

Stockholms negrer

1986

The film is about the band Stockholms Negrer, but also about what formed their music, about being Swedish but still being viewed as an outsider.

Your Call Is Important To Us

2023

The only thing colder than a Canadian winter is Canadian bureaucracy (probably). Based on five real life stories, Romy Boutin St-Pierre and Joe Nadeau pay homage to the nation-wide stress headache of phone calls with the government in this surprising short.

I Know a Place

2022

Young people who decide to leave their home to seek opportunities for the future face different difficulties on a daily basis. The inevitable estrangement with family and lifelong friends. The constant lack of understanding, the coldness and individualism of the new city. The stress and even the feeling of being a stranger back home. This journey to the future sets out issues about identity, nostalgia and courage, while they fight to find their place in a changeable world.

Gary's Story - No Second Best

Gary's Story is part of a collective filmmaking project that looks at relationships between teenagers and their grandparents in families that have recently immigrated to the US from the former Soviet Union. Gary's family is from Moscow.