Concrete Forms of Resistance
2019 · 27m · United Kingdom
Directed by Nick Jordan
Genres: documentary, essay film, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A portrait of Tripoli's abandoned Oscar Niemeyer-designed Permanent International Fair and the Lebanese citizens whose lives continue to intertwine with its vast, unfinished concrete structures.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to call this a 'poetic documentary about ruins' and feel very smart, but Jordan's actually doing something weirder—treating Niemeyer's utopian concrete like a failed political prophecy that won't stop haunting the present. It's the kind of essay film that pretends to be reverent while systematically dismantling its subject.
A formally precise meditation on architectural abandonment and collective memory that positions itself thoughtfully within the essay-documentary tradition—the restraint of the editing, the measured pacing, and the refusal to sentimentalize the unfinished structures demonstrate real curatorial intelligence about how to let materials and space speak for themselves.
The decision to let the concrete geometry do almost all the compositional work—pulling focus through scale and shadow rather than manufactured emotional beats—turns what could've been melancholic wallowing into something architecturally rigorous and genuinely moving on a technical level.
Reviews
The vast concrete construction takes up almost 10% of Tripoli, and has a beauty in its 55-year-old vision of the future, which can still be appreciated today. It's a fascinating film, and one which shows how architecture really does affect our lives, through interviews with the Lebanese people living and working in Tripoli today.