I was back at the VIFF for a nice chunk of time over Thanksgiving weekend and the days leading up to it. Last Thursday I went to check out City of Life, a swirling narrative of life in Dubai… with a half dozen characters living their lives before — boom — they all come colliding together at the end. It was a catchy, entertaining film. Much less focused on the city than I thought it might be, but a fun watch all around.

What did catch my eye, from an urban planning perspective, was a short film that proceeded it called Three Sad Tigers (UK, Spain, 2010, 14 minutes). Directed by David Munoz, it’s an all-too-brief documentary piece that records the story of three Bangladeshi tradesmen – Ahmed, Haroon and Mohammed – who were recruited to work in Dubai during the city’s construction boom.

After fronting money to in return for the promise of visa paperwork and high paying jobs, the three find themselves working for pittance. Unable to repay the loans they took out to get to the Dubai and forced to work in abysmal conditions, each suffers a further wrong when they are unceremoniously cut lose by the illegal contractor that had hired them and told that that they would have to return home.

Of course, when you look at Dubai – or any city for that matter – you don’t often see these sorts of stories reflected in the built environment. They become part of an invisible history, purposefully left out of the dominant narratives of place. This isn’t a foreign practice either. In BC we’ve only just started to account for the galling and racialized labour practices that built the railway across the country. (Of the several thousand Chinese workers recruited for the construction of the BC section, 600 workers died. One for every few kilometers of track).

Even in Vancouver proper the role of foreign labour in city-building is often obscured. The ‘erasure’ isn’t a matter of history either. Only a few short months ago a Provincial Labour Tribunal ruled against SELI (partners with SNC Lavalin on the construction of the Canada Line), finding that the company had discriminated against the Latin American workers it had brought in to work on the transit system “on the basis of race, colour, ancestry and place of origin.” Not insignificantly either – SELI was paying the latino workers far less (and providing worse living conditions) than Europeans that had been hired to do exactly the same job. It was a story that, given the timing (Olympics), did not receive the press that it deserved.

Three Sad Tigers is a short film, true, but it functions as a strong reminder of this darker side of city building. And while Dubai (and Bangladash) may seem remote in the course of viewing this film, it’s important to check that thought against what goes on in our own city. Perhaps, viewed in that way, Tigers is also a good place-holder until we get a film on our own local labour history and the different hands that have helped build Vancouver.

I had the chance to see a third interesting city film at the VIFF yesterday. This one presented another pastiche of urban life, but unlike Get Out of the Car (reviewed previously) the focus of the assemblage is a network of everyday interactions taking place in a low income neighbourhood in Recife, Brazil’s fourth largest city.

The film, Defiant Brasilia (Brazil, 2010, 85 minutes) is framed around the residents of the so-named neighbourhood – many of whom were relocated there following the demolition of a nearby slum to make way for the construction of the Brasilia Formosa Avenue. Defiant Brasilia itself occupies an interesting social and geographic space. Despite often been viewed (and treated) as a community that is ‘peripheral’ to the centre of power in Recife, it is in fact located in right near the city’s geographic and historical core.

As viewers, we move from scenes of 5-year old Cauan (celebrating his birthday with a spiderman themed party), to Pirambu (an indebted fisherman hassled for not being able to turn a profit), to Deborah (a manicurist who hopes to make it onto the cast of Big Brother) to Fabio, (the videographer she ultimately hires to help with the process). While one might be tempted to draw larger messages, or search for themes of a macro or universalist nature, the intent is actually the opposite: this is a film about the microcosms that exist within city life. Says Gabriel Mascaro, director, “I chose not to work with the idea of characters that are representative of the wider community. Rather, I wanted to investigate a more subjective, individual idea of representation. I wanted to make a film that respects the singularity of each individual.”

Amidst this cast of aspirations, the city itself (or at least the neighbourhood in question) provides a rich and ever-unfolding backdrop to the movement and interactions of its characters. Fabio and Pirambu, in particular, literally shift the film along as they travel through the streets, laneways and alleys of the city. Their bike rides and boat travels allow the viewer to explore the idea of boundaries and mobility within the constraints of the Defiant Brasilia community.

The film doesn’t have a conventional narrative arc to speak of. Instead, we drop in to watch city life unfold on a fishing boat, at Cauan’s school, on the sidewalk, and listen in on the conversations that unfold therein, becoming implicated in the ambitions, complaints, ribbald humour and gossip before moving along. It’s a fascinating excercise, particularly when you realize that the film is neither a documentary, nor a work of fiction; rather occupying a middle ground between the two wherein a set of predefined encounters set up by Mascaro serve to provide a loose framework for ‘real’ dialogues and situations to emerge.