What are today's cities like? And what's revealed by the scrutiny of filmmakers?

“City Symphonies” are avant-garde films from the 1920s, with works like “Manhatta”, “Rien que les heures”, and “Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt”. They portray cities as abstract compositions of lines, shapes, and rhythms, showing anonymous crowds and the daily rhythms of urban life, offering a unique perspective on modern society.

A century after the emergence of the first “city symphonies”, what are our cities like? And what can the scrutiny of filmmakers reveal to us?

City Symphonies relives the genre of “city symphonies” but from today’s perspective. Collecting the evidence provided by all these works, the CCCB has commissioned women filmmakers, members of the group Dones Visuals—which consists of both established and emerging filmmakers—to portray their city, Barcelona and its metropolitan area. This time, however, the films are approached as a diary written in first person, in which the filmmakers bring together thoughts, experiences, and emotions. Each film has a different kind of gaze: voyeuristic, poetic, ironic ... but all, in some way, raise universally contentious issues such as the use of public space, inequality, living in a community, the migratory experience, how intimate spaces might fit into a big city, tensions between the outskirts and the centre, the urban and the rural. They bear witness to the cities of the early 21st century, with a mosaic of visions that reveal, in a multifaceted (and sometimes contradictory) way, what life is like in today’s metropolises.