DPU70 Film Festival
A celebration and discussion of films made by the DPU and international partners in the context of teaching, research, public engagement, and policy and planning impact.
A series of film screenings drawing on the research of DPU colleagues to explore film as a method that engages with the politics of knowledge generation and ethical considerations of representation.
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Past events
How to coproduce knowledge remotely during the COVID 19 pandemic? This documentary, made as part of the project GEMDEV ‘Grounded Energy Modelling for Equitable Urban Development in the Global South’, is based on remote participatory video training to capture energy and housing challenges of low-income settlements in Lima and the strategies inhabitants adopt to reduce vulnerability.
Sensing the City: Young people and regeneration in LondonThis film is a collaboration with Pempeople and The Ubele Initiative to explore new methods of public voicing for young people. Facilitated by poet and performance artist Kat François and interdisciplinary media artist Daniel Oduntan, the film explores notions of belonging, change and displacement, race, age and labelling, Covid lockdowns and mental health, voicelessness and the importance of active listening when designing tools to empower.
(Un)Homely City: Navigating houselessness in a pandemicAttention to unhoused groups in Indian cities have been poor. The pandemic, more precisely the ways it was governed exacerbated the living conditions of the urban houseless. This documentary has been produced following a research project called ‘Interrogating Unsafety’ which examined how the measures of protection was counterproductive for the houseless in Mumbai.
Chair PanelistsThe main topic of this film is resilience of Gaza people through art. Throughout fieldwork we were surprised to hear about so many art activities in Gaza – a territory that suffers from decades of oppression and violence. We were also concerned by the ways in which Gazans are represented as passive victims rather than active human beings and hence felt that it is important to bring voices of interviewees. We felt that producing a film is effective in bringing academic knowledge to wider pubic.
Creative practice and the AnthropoceneThis audio-visual documentary was made as part of a project ‘Creative Practice and the Anthropocene ’ initiated by Liza Griffin (DPU) and George Revill (Open University) to critically explore ways that arts-based thinking and publicly engaged practice might intervene productively in the current environmental crisis. The video, directed by Chris Bonfiglioli, captures a conversation between four artists and our research team on how creative practices might be fostered, developed, and deployed to address some of the challenges of the Anthropocene.
We want to change everythingSince 1976, Habitat International Coalition (HIC) has been a global force in the struggle for social justice, gender equality and environmental justice to defend and promote habitat-related human rights. For its members, this common struggle takes place through grassroots or ‘popular’ schools. This film takes us through the critical reflections of the protagonists of some of these schools in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico and Uruguay. The film was made as part of the Knowledge and Action in Urban Equality (KNOW) programme, and in collaboration with Habitat International Coalition - Latin America as well as the feminist film collective La Sandía Digital (2020-2021).
Chair PanelistsA series of film screenings drawing on the research of DPU colleagues to explore film as a method that engages with the politics of knowledge generation and ethical considerations of representation.
After the rainThis documentary film as part of our Reducing Relocation Risks Project, It is call “After the Rain” by David McEwan and it is about flooding and relocation in Kampala, Uganda.
Kelyan Barat: Building capacity and participation for community-led solutionsThis film documents a participatory design initiative to design and develop an inclusive public space in the Kelyan Barat settlement in the city of Banjarmasin, Indonesia. The initiative built from research conducted as part of the AT2030 research project, conducted by the Indonesian NGOs Kota Kita and Kaki Kota, with the Bartlett DPU, supported by the Global Disability Innovation Hub. The film explores the challenges of developing public spaces that are relevant for a wide range of groups including disabled people, assistive technology users, older persons and children, in a dense urban setting where public space is a scarce and a contested resource.
Empowering vulnerable communities through participatory designThe film shows the importance of participatory design to empower communities and address social cohesion in contexts affected by displacement. The film is divided into two parts, the first part shows a built project in Lebanon where participatory design methods were adopted to address vulnerabilities through the implementation of a spatial intervention in a city that hosts a large number of refugees from Syria. The second part of the film shows the importance of participatory design to empower children who have been affected by displacement.
Indefensible spaceThe aim of this film is to highlight the problems and strategies related to gender-based violence faced by women in slums because of lack of secure and dignified access to toilets. The film was produced in a partnership between the Bartlett DPU, the UCL Institute for Global Health and SNEHA, Mumbai, supported by a grant from UCL Grand Challenges. The film was made in Dharavi, Mumbai, with the participation of the communities working with SNEHA, an organisation working on prevention of violence against women and children since 2000.
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DPU Dialogue in Development Series
