One Big Home

On the tiny island of Martha's Vineyard, where presidents and celebrities vacation, trophy homes threaten to destroy the islands unique character. Twelve years in the making, One Big Home follows one carpenters journey to understand the trend toward giant houses. When he feels complicit in wrecking the place he calls home, he takes off his tool belt and picks up a camera.

Anonymous

A short film about the changing face of London Soho and the implications of gentrification on Mimi, an aging transvestite.

Unarmed Verses

Toronto filmmaker Charles Officer profiles the young people of Villaways Park, a housing project on brink of historic change.

El apagón: Aquí vive gente

“El Apagón: Aquí Vive Gente” is a documentary directed by Bad Bunny and Blanca Graulau. This 23-minute film explores the socio-economic challenges in Puerto Rico, focusing on the effects of power outages and gentrification driven by the real estate and energy sectors. Through visuals and personal stories, the documentary highlights the experiences of Puerto Rican communities facing these issues.

Empire City

A film essay contrasting the modern metropolis with its "golden age" from 1830-1930, with the participation of some of New York's leading political and cultural figures. Made at a time when the city was experiencing unprecedented real estate development on the one hand and unforeseen displacement of population and deterioration on the other. Empire City is the story of two New Yorks. The film explores the precarious coexistence of the service-based midtown Manhattan corporate headquarters with the peripheral New York of undereducated minorities living in increasing alienation.

Flag Wars

Filmed over four years, this documentary focuses on the impacts of gentrification as gay white professionals move into a largely black working-class neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio.

The Iron Triangle: Willets Point and the Remaking of New York

Targeted for several failed redevelopment plans dating back to the days of Robert Moses, Willets Point, a gritty area in New York City known as the “Iron Triangle,” is the home of hundreds of immigrant-run, auto repair shops that thrive despite a lack of municipal infrastructure support. During the last year of the Bloomberg Administration, NYC’s government advanced plans for a “dynamic” high-end entertainment district that would completely wipe out this historic industrial core. The year is 2013, and the workers of Willets Point are racing against the clock to forestall their impending eviction. Their story launches an investigation into New York City’s history as the front line of deindustrialization, urban renewal, and gentrification.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

Destroyed in a dramatic and highly-publicized implosion, the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex has become a widespread symbol of failure amongst architects, politicians and policy makers. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth explores the social, economic and legislative issues that led to the decline of conventional public housing in America, and the city centers in which they resided, while tracing the personal and poignant narratives of several of the project's residents. In the post-War years, the American city changed in ways that made it unrecognizable from a generation earlier, privileging some and leaving others in its wake. The next time the city changes, remember Pruitt-Igoe.

San Francisco 2.0

San Francisco has long enjoyed a reputation as the counterculture capital of America, attracting bohemians, mavericks, progressives and activists. With the onset of the digital gold rush, young members of the tech elite are flocking to the West Coast to make their fortunes, and this new wealth is forcing San Francisco to reinvent itself. But as tech innovations lead America into the golden age of digital supremacy, is it changing the heart and soul of their adopted city?

There's No Place Like This Place, Anyplace

Over the course of over six decades, Honest Ed's became a Toronto Landmark. The neighbourhood it left behind when it closed its doors in 2016 reflects on its history and legacy.

Nemesis

The film explores the destruction of a unique train station in Zurich and the construction of the new prison and police centre in its place. From the perspective of the filmmaker’s window, and with testimony from prisoners awaiting deportation, the film probes how we deal with the extinction of history and its replacement with total security.

Cruel Architecture, a Tool of Gentrification

두 개의 문

The documentary Two Doors traces the Yongsan Tragedy of 2009, which took the lives of five evictees and one police SWAT unit member. Left with no choice but to climb up a steel watchtower in an appeal to the right to live, the evictees were able to come down to the ground a mere 25 hours after they had started to build the watchtower, as cold corpses. And the surviving evictees became lawbreakers. The announcement of the Public Prosecutors’ Office that the cause of the tragedy lay in the illegal and violent demonstration by the evictees, who had climbed up the watchtower with fire bombs, clashed with voices of criticism that an excessive crackdown by government power had turned a crackdown operation into a tragedy.

The Bannfoot Ferry

A forgotten history of Northern Ireland is unveiled through a journey into Ulster Television’s archives, and the rediscovery of the first locally-produced network drama, Boatman Do Not Tarry.

Seattle Freeway Revolt

In the 1950s, Seattle had plans to build one of the densest networks of freeways in the world. It would have displaced thousands, especially the poor and people of color. Over the next two decades, a broad coalition of communities came together and halted these plans. Testimonies from that era are juxtaposed with interviews of activists who participated in the revolt, giving a picture of what Seattle could have been had the people not stood up to the highway lobby and their representatives.

Iran : une puissance dévoilée

What kind of world power is Iran becoming, and how will Western countries deal with it?

Ayi

Ayi comes from a rural area of Eastern China and doesn’t have the residential permit that would allow her to work in Shanghai. Yet, she has been cooking in the streets for twenty years, in an old neighbourhood soon to be demolished. The film unveils the chaos of an ultra-modern city aiming to wipe out so-called substandard practices and to deport an unwanted population.

Berlin Babylon

A documentary focusing on the rebuilding projects in Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Brick by Brick

A prescient portrait of late-1970s Washington, D.C., that chronicles the city's creeping gentrification, the systematic expulsion of poor Black residents, and the community response in the form of the Seaton Street Project, in which tenants banded together to purchase buildings.

Bubble

A tropical fish shop in the East End of London, the last of what used to be many. Tiny, watery dramas inside fish tanks accompany the thoughts of local fish-keepers, while father and son Big Tel and Little Tel work to keep the shop alive.