Editor’s Pitch

If you’re already sampled the stunning Working Man’s Death, again through the epic eye of Michael Glawogger, then the scale, tone and imagery here will feel very familiar, but that doesn’t stop your breath from being taken away. Struggling to make your life better is Glawogger’s key theme and if there’s one filmmaker who can make you gasp, clench your jaw in aguish and luxuriate in the intense colour of what many of us would call misery, he’s your man. Another classic.


The world is staying the same size, but it’s becoming a more crowded place. Competition for work, for living space and happiness is a constant race amongst many populations – and never more so than in today’s metropolises.

Megacities is a snapshot of the things that bind people across four sprawling cities. Mumbai, Mexico City, Moscow and New York – on the surface, wildly different with issues, environments and lifestyles that many of us will luckily never experience. But in twelve glorious chapters, Megacities follows the daily routines of individuals who want more from their life. Observation and mood are director Michael Glawogger’s signature tools, not the lengthy interview or the dislocated commentator.

Infused with the colours so absent from today’s high definition digital productions, Megacities puts you in the middle of highly textured slaughter houses, slums, dance halls, dank subways, bustling harbours, family homes, irons smelting works, - and more. Made at the turn of the last century, this beautiful and bruising documentary is a testament to how humanity in all its variety, strength and weakness is a constant – however much the stuff around it changes.

The thin thread of people’s existence depending on one thing runs through many of Glawoogger’s portraits. A balloon seller who now makes his living playing a wind-up nickelodeon to children; a family who’s whole family survives on the selling of soup made from chicken feet; a pimp who bounces from one trick or sale to another waiting for his next heroin hit – but theirs is not a story of desperation, it is of invention and adaptation.

Megacities inhabits a place far from “reality” television but feels more authentic, rich and honest then anything regularly commissioned for a mainstream audience, This is visionary filmmaking created with humanity, humour and a positive eye on lives that are usually the footnote to the world’s problems, not the world’s riches.