Urban space is at the centre of these four films, formally attentive explorations of various intersections of gentrification, migration, and empire, from Chicago to Miami, Bangalore to London.
A Q&A with filmmakers whose work appears in this program will follow the screening.
2705 SW 3rd St, Miami, FL 33135
By Shawn Antoine II | 6 mins | 2023 | USA
Amidst the ivy-draped remnants of once-notorious public housing projects, For Those That Lived There weaves a visual tapestry, navigating the poignant impacts of gentrification, the displacement of Black legacies, and emerging migrant narratives. Against Chicago’s ever-evolving skyline, this evocative exploration immerses audiences into the soul of a neighborhood transformed.
NO SE VE DESDE ACÁ (YOU CAN’T SEE IT FROM HERE)
By Enrique Pedráza-Botero | 20 mins | 2024 | Colombia, USA
Much like the people it is about, No se ve desde acá is suspended in that stasis between arriving and finding belonging, moving associatively through observational vignettes in contemporary Miami, juxtaposed with a disruptive collection of video and sound archives that range as far back as the 1930’s, revealing an obsession with American individualism and collective uncertainty as questions arise for immigrants about cultural identity and economic opportunity.
By Arjuna Keshvani-Ham | 12 mins | 2024 | India, UK
Radicle City is a cinematic essay which imagines a future in which Bangalore’s gardens no longer exist. Narrated as a poetic address by a voice who has grown up in a city without trees, the film’s hybrid documentary and fictional narrative recovers and reinterprets footage of an unknown walker’s journey along a park that marks an old line of colonial segregation in the city. This is an old border with new lines: today the city is India’s “silicon valley”, an IT hub at the heart of a network of global capitalism, an incubator for the apparatuses of Modi’s digital technocracy and one of India’s most unequal and divided cities. Moving restlessly back and forth between past and possible future, the film is at once an investigation into the city’s complex colonial entanglements and their afterlives, and an elegy to the city’s gardens, fragile spaces of resistance in a metropolis which threatens their destruction.
OKAY KESKIDEE! LET ME SEE INSIDE
By Rhea Storr | 20 mins | 2025 | UK
Okay Keskidee! Let Me See Inside is a personal account of Black community spaces in the UK, focusing on the Caribbean diaspora. By visiting the site of the former Keskidee Center that is now luxury apartments, the film considers the conditions which allowed this historical space to thrive. The film explores the reasons why gathering in physical space is difficult because of the premium cost of space and the often free labor or government funding needed, both of which are scarce. We see the architecture of surrounding developments driven by rampant capitalism. Can the digital realm replace a physical community presence and produce an accessible archive for a new generation?
