Film session + Q&A with director, moderated by Cláudio Valente (Universidade de Coimbra)

‘Skin of Glass’, 89’, Denise Zmekhol, 2023 [Brazil]
A poetic and personal cinematic meditation on displacement, inequality and loss, SKIN OF GLASS follows my journey upon discovering that my late father's most celebrated work as an architect, a modernist glass skyscraper in the heart of São Paulo, has become occupied by hundreds of homeless families.

This personal search forces me to face the brutal reality of a global crisis: one in six people in the world are squatters. These are the cities of the future, the cities of tomorrow. I am accompanied on my journey by people with a passionate connection to my father’s work and the fate of the building. I have filmed several of them over a year, including city officials who see the building as a threat to public safety, occupation leaders fighting to protect the rights of squatters, residents of the building, and scholars of architecture arguing for preservation.

Through their stories, we come to understand the symbolic importance of the building as a reflection of Brazil’s political and economic turmoil over the last half-century.