Special Film Screening and Q&A

In collaboration with Pera Film, Istanbul Unbound will feature a screening of Natura Urbana | The Brachen of Berlin, accompanied by a special Question and Answer session with Matthew Gandy, the director.

Date: April 10, 2021 / 17:30 – 19:15

NATURA URBANA | THE BRACHEN OF BERLIN
Director: Matthew Gandy
United Kingdom / Germany, 2017, 72’, color

Natura Urbana tells the post-war history of Berlin through its plants. The film takes us from the Trümmerlandschaften and their unique ecologies to the abandoned roofs of the Friedrichshagen Waterworks on the edge of the city. Encountering an extraordinary variety of spontaneous vegetation from all over the world that has sprouted along railway lines, street corners, and in the distinctive Brachen of Berlin.
In Natura Urbana the changing vegetation of Berlin serves as a parallel history to war-time destruction, geo-political division, and the newest phase of urban transformation. Natura Urbana takes us on a unique journey through Berlin ranging from the botanical microcosm of cracked paving stones to elaborate attempts to map the entire city in terms of its distinctive ecological zones.

Matthew Gandy

Matthew Gandy is a geographer, urban field ecologist, and award-winning documentary filmmaker. He is Professor of Geography and Fellow of King’s College at the University of Cambridge. He previously taught at University College London, where he was the founder and director of the UCL Urban Laboratory from 2005 to 2011. Matthew Gandy has published extensively on urban natures, infrastructures, spaces of disease and queer geographies. His monographs include Recycling and the Politics of Urban Waste (Earthscan, 1994), Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (MIT, 2002), The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination (MIT, 2014), Nature, sexualité, et hétéropie (Eterotopia, 2015), Moth (Reaktion Books, 2016); and among his edited volumes are The Return of the White Plague: Global Poverty and the 'New' Tuberculosis (Verso, 2003), Urban Constellations (Jovis Verlag, 2011), The Acoustic City (Jovis Verlag, 2014) and The Botanical City (Jovis Verlag, 2020).