One Millionth Tower
Summary
As part of the remarkable HIGHRISE initiative, a group of local residents, ERA Architects, and the NFB have been collaborating to re imagine and explore the potential of North Etobicoke’s high-rise Kipling Towers.
The National Film Board of Canada’s HIGHRISE project is a multi-year, multi-media, collaborative documentary project about the human experience in global vertical suburbs. Under the direction of documentary-maker Katerina Cizek, the HIGHRISE team will be making lots of things. Web-documentaries, live presentations, installations, mobile projects and yes, documentary films. We will use the acclaimed interventionist and participatory approaches of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada’s Filmmaker-in-Residence (FIR) project. Our scale will be global, but rooted firmly in the FIR philosophy — putting people, process, creativity, collaboration, and innovation first.
Since the spring of 2010, the NFB has been working with ERA Architects and the Centre for Urban Growth and Renewal (CUG+R) to produce the sequel to the 1000th Tower and forthcoming web documentary, The One Millionth Tower. This process has harnessed the potentials of the interventionist, participatory approach to film-making, and has sought to empower residents to organize and effect change in their community.
While The 1000th Tower brings the viewer inside the lives of six tower residents, sharing stories of their present experience, The One Millionth Tower will showcase the bold ideas that the residents have in re-imagining what their neighbourhood could become in the future. Through a series of directed workshops, the residents have focused on the potential of the apartment site, surrounding landscape and larger neighbourhood with the aim of improving connectivity, increasing neighbourhood vitality and providing spaces tuned to their collective, contemporary needs. They have focused equally on larger planning initiatives and smaller, immediately implementable interventions.
They have been dreaming big, and planning for ways to translate their dreams into reality.
Look for The One Millionth Tower to be launched soon.
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