First conceived in the weeks leading up to the birth of film-maker João Rosas’s first child, this documentary portrait of Lisbon was initially intended to be a memento between father and daughter. What began as a record of private memories, however, soon expanded and metamorphosed, as the film takes in the unsung labour that undergirds a rapidly changing urban landscape. Here is an elegy to a vanishing city, whose history is being erased, brick by brick.
Diaristic in form, Rosas’s camera takes in the day-to-day of a construction site; here nearly all of the workers are immigrants, mostly from Africa and South Asia. Once home to a printing workshop, the building is now being torn down to make way for luxury condos. Flourishing in the aftermath of the financial crisis and the tourist boom, the condo-isation of Lisbon purports to signal an economic rebirth. In reality, such development projects heavily rely on the maltreatment of marginalised workmen, who endure harsh conditions for little pay.
