Urban Studies

Since 2011, Khalik Allah (Black Mother) has attracted global attention for his radiant portraits of the denizens of 125th and Lexington in East Harlem. In IWOW, Allah returns to the intersection to explore narratives of intimacy, voice, identity and personal transformation. Sometimes painful in its vulnerability, often extremely funny in its candor, and always visually extraordinary, Allah’s one-of-a-kind epic is a contemporary rethinking of the diary film: Gordon Parks meets Jonas Mekas. 

Through the lens of a small t-shirt shop outside Washington D.C. and its young customers, R.I.P. T-SHIRTS intimately portrays the current spike in urban gun violence and its effect on Black youth in America.

In 1999, filmmaker Davy Rothbart met Emmanuel Sanford-Durant and his older brother, Smurf, during a pickup basketball game in Southeast Washington, D.C. Davy began filming their lives, and soon the two brothers and other family members began to use the camera themselves. Spanning 20 years, this story illuminates a national, ongoing crisis through one family's raw, stirring and deeply personal saga. 

Under Tomorrow's Sky follows renowned architect Winy Maas, co-founder of MVRDV, whose work argues for transforming cities with “high rises on a human scale,” stacked structural volumes with open spaces and greenery around them that feel like vertical villages. This inspiring documentary shows Maas’ influence on contemporary architecture, and examines how his designs are offering innovative solutions for the city of the future.

The chronic shortage of housing in Central Havana has pushed the city upwards forcing some to make their homes on building rooftops. This wondrous documentary tells the story of these remarkable and resilient rooftop dwellers - a secret village, hidden from the clamor of the streets below - who have a privileged point of view on a society in the process of major transformation.

What does the future look like from where we are standing? The focus of this extraordinary documentary – filmmaker Brett Story’s follow-up to her critically-acclaimed The Prison in Twelve Landscapes – is one city over one month (New York during August 2017), a month heavy with the tension of a new President, growing anxiety over rising rents, marching white nationalists, and unrelenting news of wildfires and hurricanes. Empathetic and incisive, The Hottest August offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation at a unique moment in time.

A magical documentary, Los Reyes presents the world, or more specifically, a skate park in Santiago, Chile, from the perspective of two wise and adorable dogs, Chola and Fútbol. As the camera effortlessly follows them throughout the day and night, the conversations of young skaters are heard in the background; frank talk of drug use, sexuality, economic mobility and social marginalization. 

Between 1958 and 1960 Walter Hess and Manny Kirchheimer shot black and white 16mm film from Wall Street to midtown New York to the Delaware River. The footage was left unedited. Nearly 60 later, Kirchheimer took up the challenge of editing it, adding music and sound that would mesh with the surrealism of the material. The result is a dynamic and compact symphony of a city.

Filmed over the course of five years, The Area is a panoramic documentary about a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, home to more than 400 African-American families, that is being displaced by the Norfolk Southern railroad company. It is a complex story of economic revitalization, commercial interests, and community rights.

Manfred Kirchheimer, director of award-winning films such as Stations of the Elevated and Tall: The American Skyscraper and Louis Sullivan, whom the New York Times recently called "an indispensable New York filmmaker," takes to the streets in an ode to the men and women who earn their daily bread by diligently collecting New York City’s bottles and cans.

From director Andrew Rossi (Page One: Inside the New York Times, Ivory Tower) comes an electrifying portrait of writer and performer Okwui Okpokwasili and her acclaimed one-woman show "Bronx Gothic," a story about two 12-year-old black girls coming of age in the 1980s.

Emmy-winning director Andrew Cohn’s absorbing documentary observes the individual pursuits of four adult learners seeking a high school diploma, fraught with the challenges of daily life and the broader systemic roadblocks faced by many low income Americans.

MILWAUKEE 53206 is America’s most incarcerated zip code; 62% of adult males in this mostly African-American community have spent time in a correctional facility. This urgent documentary examines how decades of poverty, unemployment, and a lack of opportunity has contributed to the crisis of mass incarceration in this and other communities across the nation.

Shot over the course of five years, Hugh Gibson's award-winning documentary examines the lives of habitual drug users at an urban health center staffed by both former and current users; expanding into a wide-ranging portrait of the conditions that can nurture addiction and the social and legal structures that surround it.

Referencing the digital display of electric appliances after the power’s been repeatedly cut off, Isiah Medina’s audacious experimental work – one of the most acclaimed in recent years – is a personal meditation on family, friendship and the experience of living in poverty.

A walk through a quiet waterside town in England yields myriad revelations - from prize-winning Indian curries to a nearly lost world of proto-punk music - in this wondrous new documentary from Jem Cohen, director of Museum Hours and Counting.

From urban farms in Detroit to Native-owned agriculture projects across the midwest to guerrilla gardens in Zurich, Wild Plants is a kaleidoscopic portrait of activists around the world who are creating their own botanic utopias.

Renowned cinematographer and artist Christopher Doyle celebrates Hong Kong and its people with this vibrant documentary that focuses on the city's residents in their childhood, youth, and old age.

In this remarkable documentary, filmmaker Brett Story excavates the often unseen links and connections that prisons – and our system of mass incarceration – have on communities and industries all around us. Widely acclaimed, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is an essential documentary, a portrait of our criminal justice system in which we never see a penitentiary.

With readings by John Berger, Taskafa offers a brilliantly incisive meditation on urban space and city life by investigating the complex history of Istanbul’s street dogs.

The utopian dream of public housing is explored in this incandescent, artful documentary.