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Unforgettable Montevideo

View on the Pragda STREAM site

What does a city lose when its historic buildings disappear? In Unforgettable Montevideo, visual artist Alfredo Ghierra explores Montevideo’s architectural heritage as a reflection of personal and collective memory. Through interviews with architects, urbanists, historians, artists, politicians, and other voices, Ghierra examines what the city has inherited, what it is losing, and what it might still choose to preserve.

The film documents the transformation and demolition of emblematic buildings while asking how a living city can reconcile architectural preservation with growth and modernization. Rather than proposing that Montevideo become a “museum city,” Ghierra looks for a balance between its built heritage and the new city taking shape around it.

The investigation extends beyond Uruguay to São Paulo, Venice, and Sofia—cities with which Ghierra has personal connections and that face their own tensions between urban development, architectural heritage, and collective memory. Moving between these cities and Montevideo, the film considers architecture not simply as a collection of buildings, but as a record of the people, histories, craftsmanship, and ways of life embedded in the urban landscape.

At the heart of Unforgettable Montevideo is a question about inheritance: what does it mean to receive a city from previous generations, and what responsibility comes with deciding what remains for the next? The result is both a portrait of Montevideo and a broader reflection on how cities change, remember, and define themselves.

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