Three documentaries at this week's Open City Docs Fest banish the visual cliches we associate with Cairo, Paris and Rome to reveal the concealed lives that exist in and around these cities

It’s a truism that cinema shapes the way we look at cities: you need only to have seen a decent spread of movies to have been to Paris or New York, even if you’ve never been to Paris or New York. But cinema can also rescue cities from the visual clichés that consume them, as well as rehabilitating the notion that a city has one heart, one identity.

Three new documentaries screening this week as part of the Open City Docs Fest in London – Sacro GRA, Casse and Cairo Drive – insist on the amorphousness and fluidity of their respective locations.That they happen also to revolve around cars or roads is telling, since so much of our experience of city life is filtered through a screen: a windscreen, that is, as well as a cinema or computer screen.

This isn’t the only link between them. The figures in each of the films are all either stationary (Casse is confined entirely to an automotive scrapyard in Paris) or trapped on an endless spiral – stuck on looping ring-roads in Sacro GRA (the title is a pun on Grande Raccordo Anulare, the name of the road, and sacro graal, or holy grail) or chugging through infinitely chaotic traffic in Cairo Drive. Nevertheless a journey of sorts is accomplished. In the absence of much actual movement, and with all reassuring landmarks and tourist spots kept off screen, the filmmakers travel inwards to explore the interior landscape of what it means to be a city dweller.

The trailer for Sacro GRA, a lyrical portrait of the people who live and work around Rome's Grande Raccordo Anulare ring-road

Until Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro GRA premiered at the Venice Film Festival last September, no documentary had ever won the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion. But Rosi’s picture distinguished itself through its lyricism and its breadth. It is set on and around the Grande Raccordo Anulare, the 43.5-mile ring-road which circles Rome, and it retains a special fondness in the hearts of the people who live within the lazy roar of its traffic.

A camera positioned outside some of the windows on an apartment block near the road records the daily routines and conversations of the tenants, including a once-wealthy father and daughter now on their uppers; it tilts down at them with an inquisitiveness that starts off CCTV-sinister but which comes eventually to seem parental. Other characters include an eel fisherman, the proprietor of a crumbling mansion hired out to film crews, a conscientious ambulanceman and a scientist trying to save the roadside palm trees from the chomping red palm weevil. Rosi is a subtle filmmaker but it would take a stronger man than him to resist cutting from a close-up of those pernicious bugs to a wide shot of the bright-eyed vehicles swarming the highways.

Sacro GRA, shot over two years, was inspired by Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities. “Calvino used to say that the perfect voyage, the perfect journey is one that’s around the city,” Rosi said. “In this case the city happens to be Rome, but each city has its own GRA, its own Périphérique. Except, American cities don’t have that. For them it’s hard to understand. This woman from America came up to me, really upset, saying ‘I hated your film. I thought I was going to see something about Rome… Your film doesn’t look like Rome! There’s no Vatican, no St Peter’s, no Colosseum.’ She was quite disappointed but this is what I wanted to do in this film. I wanted the audience to get lost in that meta space, the psycho-geography of the space. The Romans themselves don’t know where the film was shot. The idea was to open the circle and make it like an infinite line. Almost like a mental space.”

A short clip from Casse, which focuses on a Paris scrapyard to paint a picture of the layered, hidden hardships of city life

The disgruntled American viewer who harangued Rosi would surely have no truck either with Casse, filmed on the outskirts of Paris where the Eiffel Tower is not so much as a distant needle on the horizon. The camera moves elegantly from left to right through the rows of pummelled vehicles, their gaping bonnets lending them the expressions of permanently shocked faces. But it never leaves the self-service scrapyard where men, many of them African immigrants, harvest salvageable spare parts; in fact, it gets no further than a few glimpses of the road and the railway track that lie just beyond the perimeter fence.

And yet the lives of these people, and the stories they recount of their hazardous passage to France, lend the movie boundless scope; they enrich our understanding of the layered, hidden hardships of city life. One man tells of a treacherous voyage through shark-infested waters on a boat steered by an inept captain, another of his daughter who has a law degree but now works in Paris on a supermarket checkout. Many of the monologues are delivered by bedraggled men slumped in the driver’s seats of these clapped-out jalopies, looking out at the world through scratched or broken windscreens. It’s a new kind of film: a road movie that never hits the road. And a new kind of portrait of Paris too, one in which the centre is alluded to but never seen. It’s always just out of reach, a cruel and elusive Godot of a city.

The trailer for Cairo Drive

If Cairo Drive is the least satisfying of these car-oriented documentaries, that may be because it evokes only too sharply the frustrations of negotiating a city on wheels when walking would be more expedient. (“Remember Frogger?” asks one interviewee. “Same game!”) That said, it’s no fun on foot in Cairo, as demonstrated by the choked testimony delivered by the father of a dead pedestrian.

Third gear is an unimaginable luxury for these motorists, some of whom are perfectly blasé about having obtained their licences by bribery. Not that their virtual stasis gives them any time to contemplate the fractious and vital city in which they find themselves gridlocked – they’re too busy trying to work out exactly how many lines of traffic there are, or forging new ones, to glance up from the tarmac and notice the skyline of grand buildings clustered in the haze.

They’ve made a new society, an inner city, within Cairo; it even has its own language – the “language of horns,” as one driver puts it, in which the fluent can differentiate between “please”, “thanks” and a sarcastic variation on either, simply by the intricate cadences in the toot. The Arab Spring occurs halfway through the film, but it doesn’t appear to have much effect on the drivers except for the sudden scarcity of police. Suddenly everyone with two functioning arms takes it upon themselves to start directing traffic, with all the potential for increased anarchy this might suggest.

The most illuminating comment comes from the driver who defines how the space within the car has become a sanctuary for the modern Egyptian man, doomed to live at home with his parents until he is married. “The only place where you can have your own space is in your own car,” he insists. “That’s where you and the boys can kick it.”

Each of these films in its own way reveals those kinds of concealed lives and clandestine communities that exist in and around cities. They discredit the idea that any one place can be distilled into a set of architectural icons or a single cityscape. One of the immigrants in Casse repeats the saying that “the foreigner has wide eyes but he can’t see far”. Maybe so. These three films, though, represent an encouraging corrective to that adage.

Open City docs fest

Sacro GRA

Thursday, 19 June, 20:30, Stratford East Picturehouse

Cairo Drive

Thursday, 19 June, 20:30, Hackney Picturehouse

Casse

Saturday, 21 June, 16:00, Birkbeck Cinema



Tickets are available at opencitydocsfest.com.

Which films and documentaries have shaped the way you see cities? Share your thoughts in the comments below.