Cities
2020 · 3m · Canada
Directed by Lillian Chan
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Designer Bruce Mau treats the COVID-19 pandemic as a brief crisis within a longer urban trend, urging bolder city design and an end to toxic living habits.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Mau's framing of pandemic-as-footnote to deeper urban decay is genuinely provocative—most filmmakers would've milked the crisis for emotional weight, but this essay refuses that comfort and instead weaponizes the moment against decades of bad design choices; it's contrarian in the smartest way.
Chan's formal restraint—letting Mau's ideas breathe through carefully composed visuals and measured pacing—situates this squarely in the essay film tradition of Harun Farocki and Chris Marker, where argument and image architecture matter equally; a model of how documentary can think through design rather than just about it.
The decision to let silence and negative space do as much rhetorical work as Mau's voice creates an unusual intimacy in what could've been a slick TED talk; three minutes sustains that tension between minimalism and urgent vision because the sound design knows exactly when *not* to fill the frame.