Filmmakers Courtney Stephens & Pacho Velez discuss their latest film, ‘American Sector’, following its screening on 23 November 2021 as part of the Barbican Centre and Architecture Foundation’s Architecture on Stage programme. The Q&A is led by Dr Martin Brady, Reader in German and Film Studies, King’s College London.
THE AMERICAN SECTOR
Following its fall in 1989, many sections of the Berlin Wall migrated to the US. A cinematic road trip to these artefacts of geopolitical division becomes a nuanced reflection on ‘the free world’. Vignettes in 16mm capture these slabs of the Wall in their eccentric, wide-ranging American situ – from behind the Hard Rock Café in Universal Studios, to George W Bush’s Presidential Library – while collected conversations with the relics’ custodians, owners and passers-by, allow the Wall’s mute concrete to become a conduit for discussions of present day freedom, borders, and nationhood. By travelling to over 60 of these historical fragments – while debates over border walls and historical monuments run rampant – through careful montage and juxtaposition, this documentary weaves a powerful patchwork exploring symbolism and America’s ongoing construction of its own identity.
ARCHITECTURE ON FILM
Architecture on Film is curated by the Architecture Foundation, in partnership with the Barbican.
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