REPURPOSE Film Synopses

The Battle for Johannesburg
Rehad Desai
2010
75 min

As the host city of the 2010 Football World Cup, Johannesburg caught the eye of the world, finally captured the imagination of its urban developers, reinvigorated a rather tardy city council and ignited its poor residents. However, the plan to tame the disorderly, effervescent metropolis was fraught with obstacles. Beneath the scramble for space and property lies a story of human survival for the many people who have made the city slums their homes.

Coming to the City
Eva de Breed
2009
50 min

How does one make a start in a totally unfamiliar city? Four local correspondents demonstrate what “migrating to the city” means at an individual level. In four of the world’s major cities – Shanghai, Bogotá,New York and Lusaka – fournewcomers are followed from the moment they set foot in the city. They are selected at the bus or train station and filmed for six months while they seek to build new lives.

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: An urban history
Chad Freidrichs
2011
83 min

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth tells the story of the wholesale changes that took place in the American city in the decades after World War II, through the lens of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing development in St. Louis.

At the film’s historical centre is an analysis of the massive impact of the 1949 Housing Act, which built Pruitt-Igoe and other high-rise public housing of the Fifties and Sixties. This critical piece of legislation also, ultimately, prompted the process of mass suburbanization. Those that were left behind in the city faced a destitute, rapidly de-industrializing St. Louis.

The residents of Pruitt-Igoe were among the hardest-hit. Their gripping stories of survival, adaptation and success are at the emotional heart of the film. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth seeks to set the historical record straight, to examine the interests in Pruitt-Igoe’s creation, to re-evaluate the rumours and the stigma, to implode the myth.

The Uprising of Hangberg
Aryan Kaganoff
2011
83 min

On 21 and 22 September 2010 South African police forces in collaboration with the Cape Town Metro Police conducted an operation in Hangberg, Hout Bay that amounted to an occupation by hostile forces of enemy territory. Thousands of rounds of rubber bullets were fired indiscriminately into crowds of residents of the area, resulting in four people having their eyes shot out. The entire action was conducted without a court order. The ostensible reason for the attack was to evict people from dwellings built in a so-called ‘firebreak’ on the mountainside above the Hangberg community. After the police action, which destroyed all the dwellings, none of the broken dwellings were ever cleared away, and to this day the rubble and ruin of the two-day action constitutes a far greater fire hazard than when those dwellings were the proud homes of hundreds of people.

Marina of the Zabbaleen
EngiWassef
2007-2008
70mins

Enter the extraordinary world of seven-year-old Marina. Through her magical eyes, you'll be led into the never-before-seen Muqqattam garbage recycling village in Cairo, Egypt. Marina spends her days riding flying elephants, befriending mystical pigeons, and dodging out of control butcher knives -- she even confronts an evil witch. Marina of the Zabbaleen transforms a squalid landfill village into a beautiful, dream-like portrait of family, childhood, and spirituality.

Doshi
Premjit Ramachandran
2009
74mins

In a career spanning almost 60 years, BalkrishnaDoshi’s work has in many ways mirrored the evolution of contemporary Indian architecture. Doshi’s first job under the French architect Le Corbusier, who designed Chandigarh, had a profound impact on him but he has often sought to interpret Corbusier’s modernism through local conditions of site, climate and available technology.

Not only is his work as an architect seminal but his contributions to academia through the setting up of the school of architecture in Ahmedabad and his own VastuShilpa Foundation are unparalleled. These successes are primarily due to his ability to communicate to and inspire the people around him, and his rigor as an architect. The film will not only introduce people to a truly great modern architect, but also to an evolved, cultured human being and help redirect our attention to the truly important questions of our time.

The Pipe
Risteard O Domhnail
2010
83min

When a large deposit of gas was discovered off the west coast of Ireland in 1996, events were set in motion that soon had the locals of Rossport, Ireland, up in arms against the Shell oil company.
Whether it’s Maura on a hunger strike, or fisherman Pat who refuses to alter his fishing patterns tomake way for the Shell tankers, The Pipe will both move and inform audiences in equal measure.
This is a testament to how individuals – shownhere in all their complex and, sometimes, unflattering
glory – and their actions remain important in an increasingly corporate world.

Think Global, Act Rural (Solutions Locales Pour Un Désordre Global)
ColineSerrear
2010
113min

In Think Global, Act Rural, we are presented with an argument for organic food, from a new, more political perspective – which suggests that industrial food production, with its reliance on heavy machinery and chemical fertilizers, is not merely destructive and harmful to our bodies, but also morally wrong. The film explores organic farming models and discovers that ancient farming techniques provide the best way forward for food production. Multi-award winning filmmaker,ColineSerreau, travels the world in search of those who respect the soil and sheds new light on multiple initiatives that could possibly save the planet.

The Garden
Scott Hamilton Kennedy
2008

The fourteen-acre community garden at 41st and Alameda in South Central Los Angeles is the largest of its kind in the United States. Started as a form of healing after the devastating L.A. riots in 1992, the South Central Farmers have since created a miracle in one of the country’s most blighted neighborhoods. Growing their own food. Feeding their families. Creating a community.
But now, bulldozers are poised to level their 14-acre oasis.
The Garden follows the plight of the farmers, from the tilled soil of this urban farm to the polished marble of City Hall. Mostly immigrants from Latin America, from countries where they feared for their lives if they were to speak out, we watch them organize, fight back, and demand answers.
The Garden has the pulse of verité with the narrative pull of fiction, telling the story of the country’s largest urban farm, backroom deals, land developers, green politics, money, poverty, power, and racial discord. The film explores and exposes the fault lines in American society and raises crucial and challenging questions about liberty, equality, and justice for the poorest and most vulnerable among us.

Wasteland
Lucy Walker
2010
98min

Filmed over nearly three years, WASTE LAND follows renowned artist Vik Muniz as he journeys from his home base in Brooklyn to his native Brazil and the world's largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. There he photographs an eclectic band of “catadores”—self-designated pickers of recyclable materials. Muniz’s initial objective was to “paint” the catadores with garbage. However, his collaboration with these inspiring characters as they recreate photographic images of themselves out of garbage reveals both the dignity and despair of the catadores as they begin to re-imagine their lives. Director Lucy Walker (DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND, BLINDSIGHT and COUNTDOWN TO ZERO) and co-directors João Jardim and Karen Harley have great access to the entire process and, in the end, offer stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the alchemy of the human spirit.