City Symphonies

Impersonal and beautiful images of Akerman's life in New York are combined with letters from her loving but manipulative mother, read by Akerman herself.

Hotel Monterey is a cheap hotel in New York reserved for the outcasts of American society. Chantal Akerman invites viewers to visit this unusual place as well as the people who live there, from the reception up to the last story.

This movie shows us one day in Berlin, the rhythm of that time, starting at the earliest morning and ends in the deepest night.

A man travels around a city with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling invention.

An angel tires of his purely ethereal life of merely overseeing the human activity of Berlin's residents, and longs for the tangible joys of physical existence when he falls in love with a mortal.

A day in the life of a Parisian housewife/prostitute, interspersed with musings on the Vietnam War and other contemporary issues.

An old man is wandering round a badly signposted and as yet mostly under construction Prague housing estate looking for the high rise block into which he is supposed to be moving with his daughter's family. The old granddad from the countryside likes chatting, nothing escapes his eyes and he wants to give everyone a helping hand.

Documentary about the city of São Paulo, Brazil, having as model and inspiration the previous Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927).

Mr. Hulot drives a recreational vehicle from Paris to Amsterdam in his usual comical, disastrous style.

Award-winning director Fatih Akin takes us on a journey through Istanbul, the city that bridges Europe and Asia, and challenges familiar notions of east and west. He looks at the vibrant musical scene which includes traditional Turkish music plus rock and hip-hop.

An old couple visit their children and grandchildren in the city, but receive little attention.

Caleidoscope of documentary-like scenes and re-enacted episodes of a day in the life of a large port town - Lisbon, from the old district around Saint George's Castle down to the docks and the 'Sagres' on the Tagus river, to the new commercial districts.

An artist close to the avant-gardes, André Sauvage composed the first great filmed portrait of Paris. Its ambitious symphony of a big city marries, on the music composed by Jeff Mills, the changing rhythm of the Belle Époque.

A surreal sequence of images of nature and London, Ontario, life and death.

History and the spirit of XXth century Helsinki through the cinema, documentary footage, architecture, art and politics.

The life of a great city (Paris) from dawn until dusk, including the beautiful and the ragged, the rich and the poor, with little or no comment (intertitles) from the director, Cavalcanti (whose first film this was).

Fact, fantasy and memory are woven seamlessly together in this portrait of film-maker Guy Maddin's home town of Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Sixty one-minute shots with no camera movement. This tension between painterly and cinematic space is not only experienced as an intellectual contrast but is also felt as a dialectic between permanence and impermanence.

This groundbreaking silent documentary captures the beauty and majesty of the New York City in its streets, skyscrapers, bridges, rail yards and harbors.

Figures and their shadows play sidewalk games. Far-off figures gather on rooftop under the slow crawl of a clouded sky. Skywriters stitch the ether and skyscrapers sprout from their silhouettes. Architecture frames a drifting airship, then finds a bustling Sunday crowd. Festivities regale the throng along the harbor, before sleeping strangers rest in abandonment. A figure slogs, in makeshift trappings, through flooded streets - another fjords the quagmire searching for outlets to plunge. Radiant patterns of fluid flower and flow to the withdrawing drain, as the smothering thunderheads skulk away.

Nadja is a guest student, who stays at Cité Universitaire and visits the Sorbonne, while preparing a thesis on Proust. Besides her student life she likes to stroll about Paris, to explore the variety of this wide and open city.