UK Premiere: Flag Wars (12A)

Architecture on Film

,Barbican Cinema 3
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Flag Wars

Laura Poitras (Citizenfour) and Linda Bryant’s award winning observation of complex urban conflicts, as a black working class neighbourhood receives an influx of white homosexual homebuyers.

Using the tools of cinema verité, with great intimacy, nuance and balance, the film watches as identity, politics, capitalism and community collide with the American Dream of homeownership.

Shot over four years, during which Richard Florida would publish his controversial treatise on the role of the ‘creative class’ and ‘gay index’ in urban regeneration, Flag Wars offers a careful case study of gentrification, depicting the subtle drama of urban redevelopment as it plays out on the street, in the courtroom and at the estate agent’s.

Co-directed by Linda Goode Bryant and the Academy Award winning filmmaker Laura Poitras (Citizenfour), Flag Wars candidly concerns itself with the consequences and processes of urban change, observing the plight of two historically oppressed communities battling to secure, or maintain, a place to call home.

Cinema Architecture on Film

Curated by The Architecture Foundation

US 2003 Dirs Linda Goode Bryant, Laura Poitras 86 min

Director's note

Flag Wars’ narrative structure is designed to ‘drop’ the viewer into the film’s events so they gradually watch the story unfold and come to understand the community through the people who live there, rather than through talking heads or voice-overs.

— Laura Poitras, Filmmaker

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