CROSSROADS: Life in the Resilient City
2021 · 14m · South Korea
Directed by Nils Clauss, Neil Dowling
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
A documentary portrait of five cities told through people living at the interface of rapid urban change.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Five cities, five residents, narrative built around the Seoul Biennale of Architecture — this is an architecture-festival deliverable, which means it'll be handsomely shot and have nothing dangerous to say. Functional.
Five-cities-five-stories anchored to architectural biennale rhetoric is documentary in a familiar institutional register, and at fourteen minutes the scale strains. Solid; not transformative.
14:14 commissioned for the 2021 Seoul Biennale of Architecture (under Dominique Perrault) anchoring five cities through five residents — that's a biennale-as-doc-engine, with the architectural agenda doing some structuring work. CONTENTED production; the Biennale provenance suggests serious intent even when the form is essentially institutional commission.