SKIN OF GLASS
A poetic and personal cinematic meditation on displacement, inequality and loss, SKIN OF GLASS follows my journey upon discovering that my late father's most celebrated work as an architect, a modernist glass skyscraper in the heart of São Paulo, has become occupied by hundreds of homeless families.
Watch the Skin of Glass trailer and view the festival screenings
This personal search forces me to face the brutal reality of a global crisis: one in six people in the world are squatters. These are the cities of the future, the cities of tomorrow. I am accompanied on my journey by people with a passionate connection to my father’s work and the fate of the building. I film several of them over the course of a year, including city officials who see the building as a threat to public safety, occupation leaders fighting to protect the rights of squatters, residents of the building, and scholars of architecture arguing for preservation. Through their stories, we come to understand the symbolic importance of the building as a reflection of Brazil’s political and economic turmoil over the last half century.