Borgate

The frames of the film Borgate are as rigid as the facades, streets and squares of the late-modernist neighbourhood Don Bosco on the southeastern edge of Rome. In its formic language, Don Bosco looks a lot like other European expansion housing projects from the 1940s and 1950s, but the master plan was designed under Mussolini back in 1931. And as we hear Anna Magnani's character in Mamma Roma put it, it's a neighbourhood for the people. But the aesthetic misfired: equality was felt as anonymity, rationality as inhumanity, The wide squares and everything else that was designed for giant parades are practically empty. This is where the city ends and no-man's-land begins. Media artist and architect Lotte Schreiber made a cinematic equivalent of this severe geometry of columns, beams and balconies. She filmed rigidly framed shots in black-and-white to stress their lines and the shadow effect, and used a tripod for meticulous pan and dolly shots. Decline has hit Den Bosco harder than the historic centre of Rome. There, a crumbling, age-old wall has nostalgic value, but this doesn't apply to decaying concrete in a modernist housing project. Utopia is ruined in graffiti, car wrecks, air conditioning units and satellite dishes. In the editing of Borgate, we see this reflected in moving flashes of colour footage shot by hand. They punctuate the hard modernist shell with humanity. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)