Highrise

Directed by

Katerina Cizek

Genre

documentary film

Country

Canada

How it feels

This documentary project looks at life in highrise buildings around the world. It shows stories of people living in these towers through different short films and online pieces.

observationalintimatereflectivefactualglobaleverydaycontemplative

What happens

Highrise is a multi-year, multimedia documentary project about life in residential highrises, directed by Katerina Cizek and produced by Gerry Flahive for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). The project, which began in 2009, includes five web documentaries—The Thousandth Tower, Out My Window, One Millionth Tower, A Short History of the Highrise and Universe Within: Digital Lives in the Global Highrise—as well as more than 20 derivative projects such as public art exhibits and live performances. In March 2013, the NFB and The New York Times announced a partnership entitled A Short History of the Highrise, which resulted in four short documentaries about life in highrise buildings, utilizing images from the newspaper's photo archives for the first three films, and user-submitted images for the final film. Until mid-2015, Cizek collaborated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenDocLab unit on developments for the Highrise project as part of MIT's Visiting Artists Program. In June 2015, Universe Within: Digital Lives in the Global Highrise was launched as the final installment of Highrise. In addition to awards won by individual webdocs in the series, the Highrise project received the Canadian Urban Institute's 2013 Global City and Innovation Urban Leadership Award. The total budget for Highrise was CAD$2.8 million. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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