Paper Cities is an animated documentary that rediscovers the work of the 1960s unofficial Soviet architectural group NER, through a close look into the present lives of its surviving members in today's hyper-capitalist Russia. In recreating the paradoxical context of control and liberation of the Soviet Thaw, this documentary tells the story of a fictional city that had a chance at a different future—rooted in the alignment of environmental philosophy and socialist thought. Investigating the impact of a political ideology on an architect's ideas and their transformation once the ideological context becomes obsolete, Paper Cities untangles the closely interwoven elements of design, politics, the personal lives of professionals, and their roles in the transformation of Soviet society. Constructing a more nuanced documentary narrative where oral history is combined with the animated analysis of architectural drawings and documents, it suggests a subjective, even "psychoanalytic" reading of architectural history and the design process.
