Prague's South City in innovative web doc

Most people don't find much attractive about high-rise apartment buildings, except, perhaps, the view. But an exciting new interactive Web documentary from a Czech-Canadian director provides the opposite: a view into life in highrises.

Out My Window, a four-year project by the award-winning Katerina Cizek, creates a virtual highrise out of suburban apartments from Prague and cities across the world, including Toronto, Bangalore, Johannesburg and Sao Paulo. Viewers can navigate inhabitants' flats, clicking on images to experience stories and snippets of everyday life in the form of photo collages, slideshows, 360° video and audio.

"The suburbs are at the cutting edge of the world," Cizek tells The Prague Post. "All the exciting and the problematic things happen at the edges of cities. For me, this is a lens into the uncharted, undocumented territory of the suburban vertical city, challenging our own perceptions of the urban experience."

Cizek sees linear narrative as a limiting form that has dominated television and film for too long. She cites Out My Window as an experiment in form and concept, yet one still rooted in traditional narrative.

"The digital revolution has given us the chance to change and adapt, allowing the audience to become part of the documentary. But this is still storytelling as it's been done for millennia," she says. "In reality, you don't sit there for 90 minutes just telling a story to someone. You talk about different things; you see something, an object, and you ask a question about it."

The Prague section of Out My Window takes viewers into the South City apartment of photographer Sylva Francová, who shares stories about her children, father and her own childhood growing up in a socialist panelák. Francová also discusses the huge yellow-and-blue housing block that has become a symbol of South City, nicknamed "The Great Wall of China."

Cizek herself has a personal connection with Prague.

"In the early '90s, I dreaded visiting my relatives who lived in the South City, the massive Soviet bloc city reaching beyond the horizon, homogeneous apartment slabs as far as the eye could see," she says.

But the filmmaker has since discovered a beauty in these "slabs." Indeed, she has become fascinated with concrete highrises on the edge of European cities such as Prague, and their ability to regenerate and reinvent themselves over time. 

"I began re-examining my notion of geography, my own biases and privilege, and thought long and hard about how urban geographical segregation is at play in whom we know and who we are," Cizek says.

More than 100 people collaborated on Out My Window through Skype, e-mail and Facebook. Cizek connected with local photographers, activists and journalists, and had set no standard way of compiling material for the film, with the notion that an organic approach would work best.

"I met one lady from Cuba who wanted to contribute, but she didn't have the Internet. I didn't know how she could get all the material to me. Then it turned out she actually had another friend from Canada, who was visiting her soon afterward, and one day I received a package of DVDs with thousands of beautiful photos from her apartment," she says.

Out My Window is part of a larger project established by the National Film Board of Canada, Highrise. Over a number of years, it will document the lives of those in vertical suburbs. Out My Window itself has already proved a critical success, scooping the prestigious International Documentary Film Festival award for digital storytelling.

You can experience Out My Window now at Highrise.nfb.ca/outmywindow.

Will Noble can be reached at
wnoble@praguepost.com