HIGHRISE/Out My Window

Concrete gray apartment buildings have been the most common form of housing for the past half-century. You can find them all over the world, and they all look exactly the same. But in Out My Window, the kickoff to the extensive documentary project Highrise, a plethora of variety is lurking behind all those identical windows.

On the main screen, you see a collage-like apartment building. You can click on each of the 13 windows. Behind them, 13 apartments in 13 different cities around the world are lurking: Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, Havana, São Paolo, Amsterdam, Prague, Istanbul, Beirut, Bangalore, Phnom Penh, Tainan, and Johannesburg. There are collages to be found here as well: a 360-degree view of the apartment’s interior, including its residents and their view of the city, composed of separate photos. The stories of their lives can be navigated by means of various clickable objects. Occasionally they are represented in still images with sound, at other times with real 360-degree films in which viewers can move about at their own discretion. These films were made with the special YellowBird camera, presented at IDFA’s DocLab last year.

Out My Window is a direct continuation of “Filmmaker in Residence” Katerina Cizek’s way of filming in the St. Michael Hospital in Toronto (of which the result was on display at DocLab last year): aimed at media production from the angle of the community and explicitly dedicated to social change. For IDFA DocLab, HIGHRISE/Out My Window will be screened live as part of 3 Stories of Time & Place.

Tags Art, Available Online, DocLab 2010, Immersive Tech, Interactive, Photography, Shorts / Series, Social Issue, Storytelling, Video