s e l e c t e d d o c u m e n t a r y p r o j e c t s
MAKING CITIES WORK
The Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies, the IHS, is part of the Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The Institute is a leading international organization in applied knowledge for housing, and for urban development and management.
Celebrating 50 years of IHS Making Cities Work explores the global reach of the institute's activities and presents its unique combination of graduate education, applied research, training and advisory projects.
Directed by Rob Schröder and shot in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Johannesburg, Sao Paulo and New Delhi the documentary not just highlights the IHS itself but it also stresses the need for local capacity building and for proper approaches to urban development and management in cities finding their way into the 21st century.
Making Cities Work was released on DVD in October 2008
Produced by George Brugmans/IABR for IHS Rotterdam
Over the last decennia, like a magnet gone mad, Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, has drawn in millions of migrants. Now more than four out of its six million inhabitants live in self build constructions in the informal conditions of the barrios where only the laws of the strong rule.
Caracas: The Informal City, a film directed by Rob Schröder and featuring the work of the architects Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, is a portrait of a city that is rapidly becoming the prototype for the exploding urbanization witnessed above all on the African and South-American continents. Here a completely new socio-political and architectonic reality has been developing. Shot in the spring of 2007 on location in the barrios of Caracas, the slums where Comandante Chavez has his powerbase, the film provides a unique perspective on the practice of the informal city.
This is the first in depth documentary to tell the inside story of the new informal urban developments, and to explore our changing world – the great debate over globalization, urban design and the future of our society.
VPRO, May 2007 - RFO, 2008
International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, 2007 -
AFF, Johannesburg, 2007
Produced by George Brugmans/IABR and Ymke Kreiken/VPRO
THE BROOKLYN CONNECTION 
The Brooklyn Connection, a film by Klaartje Quirijns, tells one man’s story of building a guerrilla army. Florin Krasniqi, a successful 40-year-old immigrant from Kosovo now living with his family in Brooklyn, helped launch the Kosovo Liberation Army in the late 1990s. He did it by raising some $30 million and buying high-powered sniper rifles – weapons that were and still are legally purchased – in the United States. He transported the weapons to Albania, again legally. From there, Krasniqi and his gang smuggled the weapons on donkeys or horses to Kosovo.
VPRO, September 5, 2004
- PBS/POV, July 19, 2005
IDFA, 2004 - Full Frame
Festival, 2005 - Tribeca Film Festival, 2005
Produced by George Brugmans/Amago and Klaartje Quirijns/EyesWide Films
What really inspires the Osama’s of this world? What is so utterly irresistible about the smell of paradise?
These are the urgent questions with which the two Polish filmmakers Marcin Mamon and Mariusz Pilis travel around the world for more than ten years now. On their long journey they met with warlords, clan-leaders, emirs and mullahs, but foremost with many common believers of Dar al-Islam, the abode of Islam.
The Smell of Paradise is a road movie, a personal adventure, not without personal risk, that starts in Chechnya in 1995, and ends in Waziristan, along the Afghan-Pakistan border, in the Summer of 2004. The film maps out the ideas of the “fundamentalist international”, ideas that put to the test our Western democratic beliefs about society.
IDFA, 2004
- Toronto International Film Festival, 2005
VPRO, February 20 and 27, 2005
- BBC Storyville, January 15 and 16, 2006
Produced by George Brugmans/Amago, Petra Goedings/Phanta Vision, and Mariusz Pilis/IST Film
