Os residentes

The residents of a soon to be demolished building have set up a temporary autonomous zone to declare war on a world where utopia and poetry have gone astray. They are a kind of Situationist urban guerilla, spending their days creating havoc at both a material and immaterial level. They recite, declare, discuss, perform and console. A woman is kidnapped, close combat is mimed, pubic hair formed into a mustache. Many of their joyfully nonsensical actions go round in circles, a sign already of their ironic self-reflection: When it comes down to it, they are merely an aesthetic imitation of the slogans, gestures and postures of ʼ60s and ʼ70s political and artistic practice. Ultimately, the residents announce the end of their own avant-garde movement and abandon their building to demolition. With the same pleasure in creating deliberate confusion, this imaginative and wonderfully photographed film experiments with form and content. Riddled with discursive and filmic references, it is fully aware of its own limitations whilst still stridently putting forward the thesis that in each repetition there remains something of the havoc-creating power of the original gesture. –Berlinale