Brasília: Life After Design (2017)

(On TV, May 2021) Like the city itself, Brasília: Life After Design seems to have begun with the best intentions, only to end up with something far less remarkable. Keep in mind that Brasília is a product of the Brazilian optimism of the 1960s — an entirely new city built according to an overarching plan, creating a capital out of the deserted middle of the country, with mega-construction projects and lofty goals of egalitarianism. Half a century later, documentarian Bart Simpson goes on the ground to listen to the locals as they describe how it is to live in a deliberately designed city. Alas, the execution is more laborious and muddled than you’d expect. Other than a few occasional subtitles, the entire documentary eschews context. Aside from some historical footage, much of the footage is of ordinary Brazilians going about their business. There’s a frustrating lack of contextualization, narration or overarching perspective — I have seldom so missed expert talking heads than when I was trying to extract meaning from the footage. It does not help that Life After Design presents such pedestrian material— there’s far less critical commentary about the state of Brasília half a century after its construction, and more useless minutiae than I liked. It’s simply absurd that a quick look at the Brasília Wikipedia page is more interesting than an interminable 88-minute documentary on the topic. Even watching the film itself, we’re left with more questions than answers. The film’s log-line, asking, “What is it like to live in someone else’s idea?” is remarkably banal considering that nearly all of us are living in someone else’s idea of a city, a neighbourhood or a house. There’s very little here to highlight the remarkable achievements of Brasília as a synthetic city (perhaps only matched by Canberra, arguably even my Ottawa hometown) — at best, the film seems to shrug at the utter ordinary nature of its subjects’ lives. This seems to be a prodigious waste of potential. On most metrics, Brasília-the-city is a success — in half a century, it went from a desert to the third most populous city in Brazil. It’s adding new neighbourhoods like crazy, has a remarkably good Human Development Index and presents a fascinating case study in comparing planned to organic urban growth. There is, in other words, an incredible amount of potential in a documentary about Brasília, and Life After Design barely scratches at the surface. The best thing I got out of it was an irresistible impulsion to go and learn more about the city itself.