Open City of Amereida, Directed by Andres Tapia-Urzua

Event Includes: Post-screening Q&A with Director Andres Tapia-Urzua and reception featuring Chilean wine!

"This attempt to create poetry in times when everything is pragmatism, marketing, and success... It's a great gift to the world." —Alejandro Soto, Painter, Graduate from the School of Architecture in the Valparaiso School.

In 1970, students and teachers from the faculty of Architecture at the Catholic University of Valparaíso founded the Open City of Amereida in Ritoque, Chile. This city is conceived as an architecture laboratory with an existential premise from where to inhabit, rediscover, and refound the American continent based on an original, creative, and non-colonial idea of identity. Here, for several decades, work has been done in one of architectural education's most radical experiments. Through the fusion of architecture with poetic thought, and a particular mythology of life, the "open citizens" imagine a social habitat that is different from traditional architecture and society. Based on the testimonies of its inhabitants, this documentary narrates the origins, the history, and the cultural legacy of this community that for over 40 years has explored a way of living where "...the rhyme between the word and the action..." becomes reality.