Plot Synopsis

Four one-hour films tell stories about ordinary citizens and city officials who are grappling with the changes wrought by rapid urban growth in exploding cities: Cairo, Mumbai, Shanghai and Bogota. The first film, CAIRO GARBAGE (directed by Mikala Krogh), focuses on "garbage cities" where entire neighbourhoods where people earn a living sorting and recycling garbage. The second film, MUMBAI DISCONNECTED (directed by Camilla Nielsson and Frederik Jacobi), highlights the booming city and its collapsing infrastructure that is making a daily commute unbearable -- and sometimes deadly. The third film, SHANGHAI SPACE (directed by Nanna Frank Moller), tells the story of this port city where a new building is constructed every day, whose population increases by half a million each year, and which may be forced to start building underground. The fourth film, BOGOTA CHANGE (directed by Andreas Dalsgaard), shows how two mayors, Antanas Mockus and Enrique Penalosa, changed behavior patterns and brought this megacity out of its spiral of violence and chaos. These films aired in the United States on Sundance on four consecutive Tuesdays, starting April 20, 2010 at 8:30pm ET/PT.