The 2025 MSU Summer Cinema presents a film festival titled "Is There a Desert in the City?", which moves through the ever-changing urban landscapes and areas of gentrification, (speculative) urbanism, real estate and the tourism industry in the context of global capitalism. The films explore how such phenomena shape urban landscapes and inflict them with scars, turning cities into places where people compete for space. The film program weaves together the threads that connect the high-rise buildings, the ever-growing shopping malls and hotels, the fences, the scaffolding, the paint and cracks in the walls, the factories of modernity and their ruins with the lives of those affected by and participating in urban change in Beirut, Shanghai, Pernik, Lisbon, Athens, Marseille, Haora and elsewhere.
The selected films are both documentary, each to a different extent. They follow the “seismic” gentrification and touristification, but also the forms of resistance or survival in cities that are being transformed into vast overnight stays for visitors. They deal with impoverishment and precarious employment in construction and tourism, with discrimination, displacement and confinement in a limited space. They carefully examine the aesthetics and materiality of the phenomena they record, through sound, cityscapes and found material. Parallel to the processes and politics of remembering and forgetting in public spaces, the films also address interrupted, often intimate, memories of other places, times and people. What are the everyday realities beyond the rhetoric of progress, comfort and expansion? How does global capitalism build – and dismantle – the cities we live in? How does it reshape urban landscapes, labour and everyday life?