Northwest Film Forum

To journey the streets of New York, Mumbai, Moscow, and Mexico City—the “megacities” that Michael Glawogger surveys in his documentary—is to stumble upon a new world on every block and yet see many of the same things again and again, as if in a dream. What began, according to Glawogger, as a “confusing pile of images”—kids to hustlers to targets to passengers to prostitutes—the Austrian director has carefully assembled into an adventure whose form is as dangerous as the cities that it documents. Though he avoids processing and retouching shots on principle, Glawogger stages scenes with real-life subjects that could never be captured otherwise, making his film neither a fictionalization nor the impartial observation of a bystander.