Skin of Glass

A journey to reckon with Brazil’s harsh inequality begins when filmmaker Denise Zmekhol discovers her father’s architectural masterpiece is occupied by hundreds of homeless people. Her poignant documentary delicately interweaves the personal and political in a poetic and cinematic meditation on displacement, inequality, and loss.

When director Denise Zmekhol revisits the architectural masterpiece of her late father, a modernist skyscraper in São Paulo, Brazil, she discovers it is occupied by hundreds of unhoused people. The building is marked by controversy. Once a headquarters for the police force of a dictatorial government and later a site of anarchist artwork, it was most recently taken over by housing activists in an attempt to transform their city. Through the stories of people with a passionate connection to her father’s work, Zmekhol helps us understand the building as a reflection of Brazil’s political and economic turmoil over the last half century.

Preceded By

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