Architecture on Film: The American Sector + Q&A

Following the screening we are delighted to host directors Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez in conversation with Dr. Martin Brady, Reader in German and Film Studies, King’s College London.

The American Sector (UK Theatrical Premiere)

Following its fall in 1989, many sections of the Berlin Wall migrated to the USA. A cinematic roadtrip to these transplanted artefacts of geopolitical division becomes a nuanced reflection on ‘the free world’ of the present.

Sumptuous 16mm vignettes offer a material record of these pieces of the Wall in their eccentrically wide-ranging American situ – from behind the Hard Rock Café in Universal Studios to George W. Bush’s Presidential Library, from the entrance of a gated community to Microsoft’s headquarters – whilst collected on and off camera conversations with the relics’ custodians, owners and passers-by allow the Wall’s mute concrete to become a conduit for contemporary discussions of freedom, 'unfreedom', and nationhood.