AIR LIQUIDE

Lotte Schreiber undertook a journey through Greece in winter to film anonymous architectures, the frequently found concrete skeletons.

What motivates people to organize communal living themselves? What ideals are behind it, how do they finance themselves, and how does life in a community work? Based on six self-managed residential buildings in Austria from the past 40 years, the documentary film "Der Stoff, aus dem Träume sind" (The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of) sets out to find answers. Filmmakers Lotte Schreiber and Michael Rieper tell these six stories by staying very close to the protagonists.

Sabaudia in Italy, created by Mussolini’s architects as a model “new fascist city”, was supplied with extensive farm lands converted from marshes. Yet, despite its undeniably “brutal” architecture, creators including Alberto Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini subsequently found Sabaudia to be a wonderful, hospitable place – the sign of a genuine, traditional Italy, and its resistance to all modern ideologies. Lotte Schreiber constructs a multi-faceted, documentary view of Sabaudia, inspired by but going beyond Pasolini, portraying it as a paradoxical mixture of social class separation, nostalgia, and everyday whimsy. (Adrian Martin)

Rather than focusing on the monuments and representational architecture of the Plaza, Tlatelolco concentrates on the neighboring residential high-rises. Built in the 1960s under the supervision of modernist Mario Pani, Unidad Habitacional Nonoalco-Tlatelolco is the largest apartment complex in Mexico City. Realized at the zenith of Mexico’s economic boom, Pani’s vision of a “vertical city” beyond class distinctions has itself been shaken up on multiple occasions. Schreiber and cameraman Johannes Hammel capture the fading of an urban architectural utopia.

The static and strictly framed Super8 recordings of Stromboli, the sea, and the island, construct a sublime beauty in accordance with conventions of landscape painting. The turbulent video recordings, on the contrary, play with an apparent directness, with a subjective gaze and the physicality of the images.