Part of the Real Utopias Film Program, curated by Konstantia Kontaxis. Real Utopias is part of the series A City of the People, organized by MOAD and curated by Rina Carvajal, MOAD’s Executive Director and Chief Curator.
Soul City, USA (2016), 20 minutes, Directors: Monica Berra, SheRea DelSol, and Gini Richards
Soul City is a documentary short that tells the story of a group of civil rights activists and city slickers who attempt to build a multiracial utopia in the heart of Klan Country, North Carolina, in the 1970s. Their pioneering efforts to jumpstart this black-owned, black-built town run up against tenacious enemies that still face idealists and dreamers today: ingrained racism, public skepticism, and unwillingness on the part of the government to think outside the box to solve social problems.
Paolo Soleri: Citizen of the Planet (2016), 50 minutes, Directed by Geoffrey Madeja
Paolo Soleri: architect, philosopher, and a citizen of the planet. Fans have gone as far as to compare him to da Vinci and Gandhi, but critics believed him to be an ego-driven eccentric with a failed experiment out in the desert. A student of Frank Lloyd Wright, Soleri’s utopian vision was steadfast: urban sprawl is destroying the planet and the answer is to build mega-structure cities a hundred times the size of the Empire State Building. This film explores the artist, the dreamer, the philosopher, the architect Paolo Soleri as he tried to build his new world filled with futuristic ideas and controversy.