Unfinished Modernities
Arab Cities, Architecture, and Everyday Urbanism

Calicut Hotel & Restaurant. Khorfakkan. UAE

Cities rarely arrive as finished ideas. We encounter them in fragments — a street corner glimpsed from a bus window, a façade remembered long after it has vanished, a courtyard shaped by everyday rituals. Over time, these fragments accumulate into something larger: memory, belonging, loss. This film traces modernism’s unfinished journey across Arab cities — a project that promised progress, order, and clarity, yet repeatedly collided with lived reality. Moving from villages built of earth to skylines of glass and steel, from colonial experiments to state-led visions and neoliberal spectacle, it asks a simple but urgent question: not what modernity looks like, but who it is for — and who has been left to live with its consequences.

Soundtrack:

Anouar Brahem: Les Pas du Chat Noir; The Astounding Eyes of Rita

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