The New Suburb

Water descends the mountains and gets transformed by a power plant into electricity. Its discharge is released into a lagoon, where lies an ancient city. The city has social disorders and a riot escalates into the bombing of the main train station. The blast set the surrounding landscape into a primordial land of meadows. The only survivor begins to walk through the land, encountering a landscape which humans haven't yet reached or which they have left behind. The survivor reaches an abandoned household where a boy with mental disorders guides her to the wasteland. The area is meant to be the extension of the nearest city, a new suburb. The land flattened and subdivided into geometric grids, the rivers straightened, the already built human settlements being all alike, fenced and guarded. The survivor, after acknowledging the nature of this new world, decides to head back.

Director’s statement
Uus äärelinn/The new suburb is a poetic film which aims to draw attention around the theme of "urban sprawl". The topic became important for the author at an early age, thrilled by the environment where he grew up, the northern Italian flatland, composed by an uninterrupted spread of urban settlements between cities and towns. Moving to Estonia, the author encountered a completely different reality, composed of open spaces and the possibility to move through them without fences and private property barriers. This idyllic situation was meant to change within the upcoming decade, when the Veneto model
began to appear also in the peaceful Estonian landscape. The story is built around several literature references which partially touches the theme: Je vous
ecris d'un pays lointain by Anna Banti, Petrolio by Pier Paolo Pasolini; La terra di sotto by photographer and environmental researcher Marco Quagliato.