" The film is set in Arcosanti, an experimental city imagined by the architect Paolo Soleri, whose construction, in the Arizona desert, has been going on for 30 years. Like a tourist guide, the narrator takes us with him to discover this city. Making use of the architect’s programme, the testimony and predictions of the inhabitants, who are also its builders, and memories of visitors, his discourse aims to re-create the origins and beginnings of the city’s construction. All these narratives, combined in the guide’s monologue, gradually sketch out an image of the city in all its forms: unfinished, simultaneously looking towards the future and archiving its past. The guide’s trajectory is almost circular, suggesting the entropy which hallmarks Soleri’s project and the cycle that has been established since the city’s creation. This distortion of the perception of time is conveyed by an identical light which plunges the film into the permanence of an endless day. The film thus decides […] to install the spectator in an indeterminate time-frame, in a near future or in another dimension—temporally and temporarily cut off from the world, like this community which has isolated itself by setting up home in the desert ” (Aurélien Froment).
