We welcome the heat this year with 2 features from hot chaotic cities. Ștrăndooț (‘little urban pool’) is a collection of short films shot last summer by Mihnea Mihalache-Fiastru with Mircea Topoleanu & the Black Horse Mansion crew in Bucharest’s main public pools. It reveals the ways in which the locals spend their leisure time and move within the physical and mental boundaries of the city’s public space.
,Beirut, a 2003 short film by Lebanese artist Raed Yassin, is a documentary on the marginal characters living in the city’s peripheries. A horse race gambler, a pigeon raiser, a squatter, a fisherman, and a street racer speak about their passions for risk, habit, occupation, and speed. Patient or restless, they occupy the sea but also the rooftops, watching over the waking hours of the city and the somnambulant wanderings of its citizens. Each hobby has its proper terminology, and every obsessive his way of circumventing the conventional flows of city life. Yassin employs simple techniques such as monochromes and slow-motion to accentuate the habitual gestures of these figures, fabricating a playful, fast-paced, and cut-up ode to Beirut, which he imagines to be itself a suburb to an imaginary city.
