VOGELFREIMedia & Information

Guangnan, a Dong village in southern China, experiences a reshaping of its daily life through a process that negotiates outside interventions and local heritage.

The cinematic documentation is organized in three parts: observation of daily life and ongoing work in the village, analysis placing Guangnan within the wider development of rural China, and animation representing Dong myths and lore.

Civic Space is a site of interplay, where the strategies of survival and control enact the dynamics that generate the spaces we encounter.

The project sets archival media and fieldwork of informal settlements in the 1990s beside contemporary photographs of sites in New York, tracing the material dimensions of policy and survival that not only co-inform but generate the conditions we encounter.

A study into the role of the metropolis in shaping the minds of its inhabitants, through two cities with parallel histories: New York City and Vienna.

The project treats the city as a symbolic structure as well as a physical one, reading buildings, streets, and public spaces as expressions of collective meaning.

The decaying rural Balkans serve as the contextual anchor for a docu-fictional investigation of diaspora relationships and the lived realities of displaced people.

The film, co-edited with Sahraa Karimi during a documentary film workshop at Yale University, is carried by authentic people and real places.