Brasilia – Life After Design

Director: Bart Simpson

Country: Canada/UK

Running Time: 88′

London Premiere

Year: 2017

With The Barbican, Robin Hood Gardens and Thamesmead, East London is home to some of the great modernist architectural projects of the 20th Century. Perhaps no project however quite rivals the scale of Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasília: a utopia in the desert designed to birth “the new Brazilian citizen”. Accompanied by a haunting, poetic score, director Bart Simpson’s camera moves meditatively through the beautiful concrete connecting individual stories of isolation, struggle and hope with the ambitious tale of the city itself. Brasília: Life After Design brings a human face to a utopian ideal and asks the question: What is it like to live in someone else’s idea?
~Will Swinburne

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Director Bart Simpson, Producer Aimara Reques, Hattie Hartman (Sustainability Editor at the Architect’s Journal) and Ricardo de Ostos of the Bartlett School Of Architecture at UCL. 

Chaired by Eddy Rhead of The Modernist Society. (http://modernist-society.org/) the panel will discuss the film, the legacy and future of Brasilia and modernist projects in Brazil, the UK and beyond.