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While sharing bread, potatoes, cheese and Grief… Santwana (an Indian filmmaker) learns Romanian death songs from Anica (funeral mourner), their humane connection makes us wonder, if grief needs any language at all?

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A visit by an Indian filmmaker interrupts the life of Anica and Emil, a Romanian countryside couple. Santwana (the filmmaker) learns Romanian death songs from Anica (the funeral mourner) while sharing bread,potatoes,cheese and Grief. They can’t talk but they can sing. They can’t console each other with words but they share silences. While listening to the trains pass by in the mountains of the village called Romuli, a tale emerges of a unique and most humane connection, making us wonder, does grief need a language at all?

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The gardens of the old city of Fez lie abandoned, while a schoolteacher, an architect, a gardener, a poet, and a dancer recall the worlds they enclose.

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The narrow streets of the old city of Fez wind around walled houses, crumbling palaces and quiet courtyards. Rajae, a schoolteacher, reminisces about the gardens and streams–places once alive with mystery and discovery–that have now fallen into neglect or vanished entirely. She urges her students to remember the stories still living within the city walls. As architect Rachid Haloui uncovers the hidden network of waterways and springs that shaped Fez, Rajae sets out to develop a play, determined to revive these stories. Elsewhere in the city, a poet recalls an old poem, a gardener tends one of the last remaining plots, and a dancer encounters the spirit of water. Their stories, rituals and songs, as well as the daily care of public fountains and parks, reveal Fez as a city on the threshold–where despite the subsiding loss of its ancient culture, memory and imagination persist, deeply intertwined with everyday life.

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Uncoding the City comprises three Multimodal Anthropological Videographies. Based on multi-sited ethnography in the field of "smart cities," part one analyzes how hi-tech companies re-symbolize cities as future-oriented and digitally codable to increase their financial, symbolic, and data capitals.

Film synopsis

"Uncoding the City" is a research project based on three Multimodal Anthropological Videographies (MAV) that offers two main contributions to anthropological research: (1) Theoretically, it analyzes urban digitalization through a neo-Bourdieusian approach; (2) Methodologically, it provides an innovative approach to analyzing and presenting ethnographic observations by means of multimodal videography.

This research project is based on a multi-sited ethnography in the field of "smart cities," where digital means are supposedly designed to increase the efficiency and predictability of urban infrastructures, services, and planning. Part one of "Uncoding the City" focuses on how technology companies re-symbolize the urban sphere as a digitally codable sphere. It analyzes the storytelling and visual techniques that technology companies use to deepen their presence in the urban field, in order to increase their financial capital, data capital, and symbolic capital.

This videography shows how technology companies re-symbolize urban space as future-oriented and digitally codable through the following chain of speculations: since people have certain needs and since technology is the solution to these needs, the intervention of technology companies in the public sphere becomes unquestionable and inevitable. By juxtaposing marketing materials for smart city products with ethnographic accounts of everyday life in the city, part one of Uncoding the City uncovers and troubles these speculations.

Methodologically, MAV offers an innovative platform for analyzing ethnographic data through experimental editing. MAVs juxtapose two or more materials simultaneously on a single screen in creative, original ways that enable dialectical and even trialectical forms of analysis and display.