City planners decide to pull down parts of Shanghai's old town in order to regenerate the city. Every year more than one hundred thousand families are forced to leave their homes and move into buildings on the edge of city. Under construction is a two- and three- dimentional flight across the now destroyed living areas of Shanghai which shows how random and brutal decisions can affect peoples's lives.

Traditionally considered to be a postmodern city, Dubai is actually a confrontation between two ways of life. The most densely populated part of the city lives in what could be considered a “modern” architecture and society. The other part, the one that is better known, is based on the postmodern philosophy that Jeremy Rifkin has described so well. SelfFiction reveals these contrasts.

Traditionally considered a postmodern city, Dubai is actually a confrontation between two ways of life. The most densely populated part of the city lives in what could be considered a “modern” architecture and society. The other and more widely known part is based along the lines of the postmodern philosophy that Jeremy Rifkin has described so well.

Stranger than fiction... In 1998, seven years after the independence of the country, the autocratic Kazahk president Noursoultan Nazarbaiev decides to move the capital city Almaty to Astana, in the northern steppes. Vertiginous towers spring out of the ground, financed by oil exports. The film opens with a presidential speech in 1997 on the future of Kazakhstan, boasting to “the three layers of society, the rich, the middle class and the poor” of the infinite promise of the free market. Christian Barani and Guillaume Reynard observe the life of a new society, in the standardised and gaudy trappings of wealth. Through an ex-Soviet oligarchy in full expansion, a melancholy and poetic portrait of globalization.