Film Screenings @ Alliance Française de Bangalore

Join us this weekend for two film screenings as part of our project Travelling Plants at the Alliance Française. Both the films deal with the changing vegitation in the urban landscape.

Beating Sun by Philippe Petit

Max is preparing an architecture and landscape competition for the city of Marseille. He is confident, his project is daring but pioneering. The oral is going well. The garden on this square is finally emerging and with it radical changes for the inhabitants as well as for Max whose career is stalling dangerously.

Beating Sun
by Philippe Petit
2022 | 85 Min. | Drama | Colour | French with English subtitles

Date & time: 11.10.2025, 4 pm
Venue: Médiathèque, Alliance Française de Bangalore

Philippe Petit is a French writer-director and actor. Resident at the Villa Médicis in 2016, he directed short and medium-length films, selected in many festivals including Primes de Match, Digital Cut, Buffer Zone, etc. as well as documentaries like Danger Dave or more recently Grand Appartement. He has collaborated as an actor with various filmmakers, from Quentin Dupieux to Mia Hansen-Løve, or more recently Thierry de Peretti and Rabah Ameur Zaïmeche. In 2022, he finished Beating Sun, a feature-length fiction film, produced by Frédéric Dubreuil for Envie de Tempête.

Natura Urbana: The Brachen of Berlin by Matthew Gandy

The film explores Berlin’s post-war history through its plants, from Trümmerlandschaften to the Friedrichshagen Waterworks. It highlights diverse spontaneous vegetation along railway lines and street corners, reflecting the city’s war-time destruction, division, and urban transformation. The journey ranges from cracked paving stones to mapping the city’s ecological zones.

Natura Urbana: The Brachen of Berlin
by Matthew Gandy
2017 | 72 Min. | Documentary | Colour | German with English subtitles

Date & time: 12.10.2025, 5:30 pm
Venue: Médiathèque, Alliance Française de Bangalore

Matthew Gandy is a geographer, urbanist, and cultural critic. He was born in Islington, North London, and is Professor of Geography at the University of Cambridge. He previously taught at University College London where he was Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory. He has published widely on urban and environmental themes including the prize-winning books Concrete and clay: reworking nature in New York City (2002) and The fabric of space: water, modernity, and the urban imagination (2014).

His film criticism includes essays on Antonioni, Haynes, Herzog, Pasolini, and Teshigahara. He directed and produced the documentary Liquid City (2007), which was premiered in Mumbai and shown at the London Documentary Film Festival. Natura Urbana is his second film.