The Cinematic City program explores the multifaceted relationship between cinema and the city through various lenses: documentary and narrative film, observation and abstraction, classics and contemporary festival selections.

 This is not merely a collection of films about different cities. The program fosters a dialogue among the films, each of which, in its own way, explores the city as a space, a system, and an experience. Each film offers a unique way to observe how the city exists on screen—and how cinema seeks forms to depict it.

The city as a system and a machine; as a sensory experience; as a space of solitude and connection; as a social reality; and the city as an experiment.

Ultimately, the program poses a simple, open-ended question: How are the ways of seeing the city on screen changing—and what do these changes say about contemporary life? And where, in this mutual movement, are we headed?

The program was curated by Ulyana Toporovskaya, a filmmaker and film curator. In 2020, she founded the Qara Film Festival, an international documentary film festival, where she also served as program director. As a curator, she explores the intersections of various cinematic forms and aesthetics—documentary and fiction, observation and absurdity, realism and magic, the personal and the public—fostering a dialogue between films through different ways of perceiving and reflecting the world. As a filmmaker, she draws on autobiographical themes, the female experience, and the stories of people in states of transition. She holds a Master’s degree in Film Production from Goldsmiths, University of London.

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