The city and urban life can be experienced in cinemas at the UrbanEye Film Festival.

What is the true meaning of a city? How do cities vary from country to country? And how can a community solve its problems?

There are several ways to address the theme of habitation, and UrbanEye Film Festival comes with examples through fiction features, documentaries and films about the architect life.

This edition brings special guests and related events, such as exhibitions, guided tours, and workshops for children or high-school students. Participants will have the opportunity to visit the exhibition on living in Romania, which was created in partnership with MKBT: Make Better.

This year’s guests are: Karsten Michael Drohsel (works in Urban and Regional Planning field, Game Design and manages Impulsbüro in Berlin), Krzysztof Ingarden (architect, professor and dean of the Architecture and Fine Arts Faculty at AFM Krakow University), Miruna Dunu (visual artist, graduate of the Architecture Faculty at Manchester University, UK and of Eindhoven Design Academy in the Netherlands. Her debut film, Coastland, will be screened at UrbanEye on November 10th at 4.30 pm), Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou (ethnography enthusiast, Papanicolau made his second documentary film, The Disappearance of Robin Hood, which can also be watched on November 10th, at 6.30 pm), Ana-Maria Elian (Urban Planning and Public Policy specialist and Program Director at MKBT: Make Better, an organization active in local development and urban rehabilitation), Ioana Petrache (active in community development, facilitating participatory processes, workshops and long-lasting projects that led to the rise of some civic initiative groups and community organizations).

Special Events UrbanEye

The LO ± VE. 100 years of living and neighborhood in Romania exhibition will be held in the foyer of the French Institute and addresses the subject of inhabitation changes over the last 100 years, passing through important moments in the history of living in Romania and the meaning of inhabitation and neighborhood. It will have it’s opening on November 8th, at 6.00 pm, and on that weekend there will be workshops for children (signing up is recommended), feature and short film screenings followed by debates. More details about the program here.

The PLAYING BUCHAREST workshop – urban gaming for a better understanding of places and neighborhoods. It attempts to involve people in decisions that could affect them and to challenge them in finding solutions. The workshop will be held by urban planner Karsten Michael Drohsel on November 10th, at 10.30 am.

Introducing the ARound the City app through an urban tour. The application started with an experimental workshop on enhanced reality interactions in the urban environment, where participants could experience the latest technology alongside the Augmented Space Agency, ARCEN and Unicat. The result is an AR adaptation of the cultural, urban and social heritage of Magheru Boulevard meant to help people discover more about this boulevard. The tour for introducing the app will take place on November 11th, meeting point – the French Institute, at 11.30 am. The app can be found in Play Store and App Store.

We also recommend you not to miss the film No Man’s Land, directed by VIRA Films and MKBT: Make Better: worldwide, 1 out of 8 people lives in a slum, and the phenomenon is rising. In Romania, informal living is a little-known and a less discussed reality at a national level. It affects, however, over 64,000 families and over 200,000 people – invisible citizens who cannot receive, for example, a permanent ID card. The film tells the story of some of these families, in an attempt to make the 200,000 “invisible” people – visible.

Another film premiering on the festival is Gaming the Real World (directed by Anders Eklund), which defines the use of video games in stimulating the residents’ involvement in planning their home areas. The film addresses the concept of civic gamification, also known as civic participation through games, which helps the democratization of urban architecture and planning. Among those who provide a documented insight of the phenomenon are the creators of Minecraft, Cities: Skyline and Block’hood.

On November 11th, at 1.30 pm, at Elvire Popesco Cinema, the public can watch the films made by the teenagers who attended the “My first documentary” workshop, organized in partnership with the Vira Association.

The 5th edition of the UrbanEye Film Festival will take place this year between November 7th-11th at Elvire Popesco Cinema and Apollo111 Theater.

For more details visit the UrbanEye website and the Facebook page. The program can be found here and tickets can be purchased on Eventbook.ro.

Melissa Antonescu

Writer, photographer and videographer. For Films in Frame she writes news about the latest happenings in the film world and brings to the readers' attention the productions that can be seen at the cinema. When she's not writing articles, she's photographing people in a small studio or searching for new cake recipes.