A Short History of the Highrise
2013 · 20m · Canada
Genres: animation, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender, whimsical
An interactive project traces 2,500 years of living in tall buildings worldwide, using animated archival photographs, rhyming storytelling and reader-submitted images to probe how vertical housing shapes social equality in cities.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's obsessed with the 'interactive' tag, but honestly this feels like a textbook essay film wearing a gimmick—rhyming storytelling about vertical living? It's almost *too* tasteful, like someone designed it to win a programming committee vote.
A rigorously constructed genealogy of the highrise that understands its own place in the essay-film tradition while refusing to choose between animation, archival material, and participatory form—the rhyming voice and reader submissions anchor what could've been dry historiography into something genuinely tender.
The decision to animate archival photographs rather than narrate over them is what sells this; it's the kind of small, deliberate choice that transforms a concept about urban housing into something that actually *feels* like dwelling in time.